The Therapist as Listener: Martin Heidegger and the Missing Dimension of Counselling and Psychotherapy Training - Softcover

Wilberg, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1904519059 ISBN 13: 9781904519058

Publisher: New Gnosis Publications, 2004

Synopsis

Listening is clearly central to the practice of both counselling and psychotherapy. Given this, it is quite extraordinary how little thought has been given to the nature of therapeutic listening and to the cultivation and evaluation of the therapist as listener. Instead, listening is a subject marginalised in both the theoretical literature on psychotherapy and in the practical training of counsellors and psychotherapists - not to mention physicians and psychiatrists. In this collection of essays and articles by Peter Wilberg, the thinking of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger provides the platform for an exploration of the deeper nature of listening as a mode of active inner communication with others - one of profound significance not only in the 'helping professions' but in inter-personal life. In professional training contexts, the willingness of the trainee therapist to listen and hear is taken for granted, and the "art" or "skill" of listening reduced to learning different ways of responding to what a client says. From the client's point of view however, healing begins with being fully heard - not with the therapist's responses. Indeed what a client says or does not say and the way in which they say it or "unsay" it is already a response - a response to the way in which the therapist is or is not listening. Listening is no mere natural ability or technical communication skill. It is a basic dimension of what Heidegger called our human Da-sein or (t)here-being. What we are capable of hearing is determined by our capacity to be fully present and here with ourselves, and at the same time fully there and "with" the other. Listening is not just a basic mode of Da-sein. It is also midwife to the word. What Wilberg calls Maieutic Listening (from the Greek maieuesthai - "to act as a midwife") is not a new form of psychotherapy, but the embodied essence of therapeutic listening. "The Therapist as Listener" not only critically questions many of the professional mod

About this title

Product Description:

Listening is clearly central to the practice of both counselling and psychotherapy. Given this, it is quite extraordinary how little thought has been given to the nature of therapeutic listening and to the cultivation and evaluation of the therapist as listener. Instead, listening is a subject marginalised in both the theoretical literature on psychotherapy and in the practical training of counsellors and psychotherapists .In this collection of essays and articles by Peter Wilberg, the thinking of Martin Heidegger provides the platform for an exploration of the deeper nature of listening - not simply as a passive prelude to therapeutic or diagnostic responses, but as a mode of active inner communication with others. What Wilberg calls Maieutic Listening is not a new form of psychotherapy, but the innately therapeutic essence of listening as such - understood not as a mere therapeutic 'skill' but as a our most basic way of being and bearing with others in pregnant silence.

Review:

Although on first reading Wilberg's writing may seem quite dense or intense, I see it as an invitation to think seriously and question deeply rather than merely accepting superficial platitudes or external solutions. He writes of a world that has meaning, depth and soul. --www.meaningofdepression.com

About this edition

• Publisher: New Gnosis Publications
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1904519059
• ISBN 13: 9781904519058
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 174