Knowledge vs Experience in coaching

The popular mantra "psychotherapy/coaching is a relationship" can be understood in more than one way.

The traditional psychoanalytic understanding of this thesis centers around transference: therapeutic relationship becomes the place where the client exhibits his usual patterns of relating to others; these patterns contain crucial links to the source of the client's suffering. Thus, by focusing the client's attention on these patterns as they emerge in the analyst-client relationship, the analyst can help the client learn something about himself and overcome the painful patterns.

Rogers, who is even better known for adhering to this mantra, used it in a different way. To him, it meant that therapy is the type of relationship where the client feels safe enough to explore his own inner dynamics. Rogers believed that if the therapist is able to maintain an "unconditional positive regard" for the client and, essentially, love him enough, the client will be able to, over time, look at his own darker sides without turning away and eventually do something about them.

In his book "Coming to Life in the Consulting Room," Thomas Ogden introduces a different view of this thesis.

Ogden introduces a distinction between epistemological psychoanalysis and ontological psychoanalysis.

Epistemological psychoanalysis aims to help the client learn something about himself. The main tool of such analysis is interpretation, i.e., the analyst's attempt to convey an understanding of the patient's unconscious fantasies, wishes, fears, impulses, conflicts, aspirations, and so on. Freud and Klein are prime examples of such analysis, according to Ogden.

On the other hand, ontological analysis is less concerned with what the client knows about himself and more with "facilitating the patient's efforts to become more fully himself." Ogden shifts the focus from the knowledge the client gains in analysis to the therapy process, through which the client starts to feel more alive, more real, and more creative. In his view, therapy is not so much of a place to learn but a place to experience something.

Then, "therapy is a relationship" for Ogden means something else. It's not a relationship as a screen for the client's transference; it is a relationship where one is experiencing something.

Ogden writes in a pretty muddy, almost mystical way about what this looks like:

Winnicott (1971c), almost in passing, in his "transitional object" paper, uses a phrase that I view as the process underlying successful psychoanalysis and every other form of psychic growth: we "weave other-than-me objects into the personal pattern" (p. 3). In other words, we take something that is not yet part of us (for example, an experience with a spouse or a friend or in reading a poem or listening to a piece of music) and weave it into who we are in a way that makes us more than who we were before we had that experience, before weaving the experience into our personal pattern.

Then, he makes his point clear:

… as psychoanalysts, we must shed the desire to understand and instead engage as fully as possible in the experience of being with the patient.

Thus, to Ogden, in ontological analysis, therapy is a relationship where one's experience is shared. The clinician's role is not to explain the client's experience but to inhabit it and be in it. And to communicate his experience back to the client, who cannot yet put it into words.

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In summary, we have three interpretations of the mantra "Therapy/coaching is a relationship:"

• Therapy/coaching relationship provides a screen for the client's interpersonal patterns to surface and be examined.

• Therapy/coaching relationship provides a safe space where the client can see himself.

• Therapy/coaching is a relationship where the client's experience is shared and put into words.

Of course, these different angles of the relationship can (and should) be present in one therapist/coach-client dyad. And it is up for debate which one is truly responsible for change.

One can argue that the second and third aspects of the relationship are insufficient on their own and serve to facilitate the client's self-understanding. But here, I'm revealing myself as an epistemological analyst.