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Dr. Bordin states that he addresses his excellent book Psychological Counseling primarily to students in training for clinical and counseling psychology. Counseling, as distinguished from other forms of psychotherapy, is seen as especially suited to “minimally anxious people whose orientations toward help are likely to be limited to the resolution of specific problems” (p. 376). Despite the author's delimitations, this book should prove of value to all practitioners, whether they call themselves counselors, psychotherapists, psychiatrists or psychoanalysts.
The basic aim of the work is to specify those characteristics of the inter-personal relationship between counselor and client which have therapeutic efficacy. In order to achieve this goal, many verbatim transcriptions of interviews with different counselor-client pairs, and at various stages of the therapeutic process, are presented. These are discussed in order to sensitize the reader to the significance of apparently simple behaviors and to highlight the consequences of the counselor's choice of response. Diagnostic emphasis is rejected; the focus of the counselor's attention is upon the current significance of the client's actions and attitudes. One of the major virtues of this book is that it offers clear illustration of the need for variation in the counselor's orientation with different clients, and at different stages of treatment. In particular there is an interesting discussion of the purposive manipulation of the level of ambiguity which characterizes the relationship. The counselor controls the degree of ambiguity in relationship to the needs of the client at any given time. For example, when the level of anxiety is so high as to precumacrde the client from making any advance, the counselor may intervene by giving more structure to the interactions. Throughout, attention is centered upon counselor flexibility and upon techniques for meeting the client at his own level so as to facilitate constructive u