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This is a thought-provoking and clinically challenging book structured around real and imagined conversations with the author's clients. Rob Hill is a relational psychotherapist trained at the Metanoia Institute in London, England. From the information on its website, the Metanoia Institute is not a traditional psychoanalytic training institution, but rather a center for training in counseling psychology and psychotherapy. As far as I can determine, a relational psychotherapist is an inter-personally oriented therapist in the tradition of Harry Stack Sullivan, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, and others. I emphasize this distinction in therapeutic orientations because the central focus of this book is the dynamic interactions, real and imagined, between Hill and his clients from a relational point of view.
At the outset, Hill states that he is interested in the extent to which psychotherapists should engage “truthfully” and “openly” with their clients: that is, engage with them in such a way that the subjective experiences of the therapist are viewed neither as “problematic failures” nor as “purely epiphenomena of transferential dynamics” (p. x). In fact, Hill studiously avoids using such terms as transference and countertransference, but instead refers to experiences that “hold within them important truths which might be of use to the client” (p. x). According to Hill, these shared experiences between therapist and client are meant to evoke “curiosity, even perplexity, rather than conviction” (p. xiii).
Hill states that his interest in “truth telling” was influenced by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, who gave a series of lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1983. The lectures were devoted to the ancient Greek notion of “parrhesia,” translated as “frankness in speaking the truth” (p. 14). For Foucault, “truth telling” is “foundationally connected with healthy relating and healthy relationships” (p. 23). On the other hand, it can also function as a