A Therapist's Phenomenology of the Between

Vorwärts aber und rückwärts wollen wir
Nicht sehn. Uns wiegen lassen, wie
Auf schwankem Kahne der See.

In 2006 I sat down in an audience of person-centred therapists to listen to Dave Mearns, Elke Lambers, Brian Thorne and colleagues gathered at the Mary Kilborn Lecture at the University of Strathclyde. The lecture was marking Mearn's retirement from his professorship at Strathclyde and my own beginning in person-centred clinical practice. I was riveted. As my counselling tutor of the time had noted, my interest in the grounding philosophy of person-centred psychology went beyond the bounds of the practitioner training course. Mearns and Cooper were rich ground for my thinking and interests, then and still now. During the lecture they discussed philosopher Martin Buber, and the I–Thou meeting, describing the moment in which two people become fully present to one another. During the lecture, Mearns insisted on the necessity for person-centred practitioners to take up the task of understanding the philosophical roots of the approach and to develop an interest in research. In doing so in the years since, and as we are thrown into an AI worlding, I return to this and to another event, where Buber's most searching test of his ideas, half a century before, took place in a public conversation with the founder of the person-centred tradition, Carl Rogers.

The April 1957 recorded meeting between Buber and Rogers at the University of Michigan carried a curious irony. The setting was a tense and structured one by all accounts. Maurice Friedman, Buber's translator and interpreter, moderated and set its terms: Rogers would put the questions, and Buber would respond. Speaking in a language that was not his own, Buber, occasionally reaching for an English word, spoke in front of an audience calling out words to him, with laughter and applause in an entirely imperfect and human occasion. Arguably, almost nothing about it was suited to the thing they had come to examine; the nature of genuine human relationship and dialogue, what a real meeting between two people actually is, and whether it can be mutual. In their discussion, that opened into the questions that divided them: whether the therapeutic relationship is a true I–Thou meeting of equals (Rogers) or an asymmetrical one (Buber), what acceptance versus confirmation of another person involves, and whether genuine dialogue is even possible in a staged, public setting. The irony then, is that Buber doubted whether genuine dialogue was possible before an audience at all, for him, true meeting is never a performance. So the event itself, its setting and its subject, stood in tension from the first exchange.

Yet, the imperfection of this meeting is the point perhaps, because what Buber and Rogers were disagreeing about was whether, and how, real meeting can occur at all. Rogers's theory, and his thesis put to Buber, is that in the deepest moments of therapy something genuinely mutual takes place; a meeting of two persons who are, however briefly, equal. Interestingly, Buber would not grant the equality. Instead, the therapeutic relationship, he insisted, is real but asymmetrical, that is the therapist can practise what he called inclusion, holding the client's side of the encounter and their own at the same time, without abandoning their own ground, while the client cannot do the same in return. Were the client able to, the roles would have dissolved and the therapy would be over. The meeting is genuine; the mutuality is not complete.

With this, in that refusal, Buber is describing a relation that fits neither of his famous categories; being more than the I–It of use and function, and less than the full reciprocity of the I–Thou: a real meeting, held open from one side. Buber placed this relation among the helping relationships – those of therapist, teacher, and pastor – and it is, not incidentally, the very structure that Mearns and Cooper would later set at the heart of person-centred practice (Mearns & Cooper, 2005).

Mutuality

However, the term mutuality needs some further thought because Buber and Rogers orient differently to it. A full discussion of this goes beyond the purposes of this article, but is necessary in brief.

Mutuality carries a different charge for each thinker. For Buber, mutuality (Gegenseitigkeit) is the reciprocal presence of two whole beings, each turning toward and affecting the other, never mere empathy or exchange (Buber, 1923/1958). It admits of degrees, and in the helping relationships it is structurally capped: the therapist practises a one-sided inclusion (Umfassung), holding both poles at once, which the client cannot return (Buber, 1947; Anderson & Cissna, 1997). For Rogers, his orientation is experiential; when the therapist is fully congruent, the roles shift and momentary meetings of equals can genuinely break through, what Rogers called presence (Rogers, 1980). In this way, Buber is asking what the relation structurally permits, while Rogers presents what the moment delivers. Yet both, notably, are describing something fleeting, enabled by undefended presence. My question, a rigorous position rather than a softening, is that "both/and" has a precise value here.

Essentially, the two thinkers present a binary that dissolves when we separate structure from moment. I recognise Buber's standing frame: the therapeutic relationship is, in its enduring shape, asymmetrical; one came for help, one holds the room, as I recognise from my own practice. Equally, Rogers is right about what might be called the peaks: that within that frame, moments of genuine mutual meeting flash up. Often noticed because they are uncomfortable for the therapist but in person-centred therapy do not mean the therapeutic relationship collapses, but rather it deepens with skilled work of congruence and reflexive presence. Interestingly, these opposing meanings appear not as in opposition but as describing different temporal registers. Indeed, in Buber's own teaching, his I–Thou was never a standing state. Buber insisted that "every Thou must become an It," that the Thou flares and passes and cannot be held. Mutual moments and the asymmetrical frame don't contradict in this understanding; the frame is what the moment keeps returning from. We can imagine this in this way, notably a metaphor that surfaced in my own dialogue with AI during writing, that Rogers described the lightning and Buber described the weather. It is therefore, not a choice between them, we are naming the relationship between the flash and the sky. The both/and.

Both/And

When I practice as a therapist, using congruence correctly, bringing my humanness, flaws and uncertainty into the space, this is Rogers's own condition made visible. Congruence is the mechanism of the mutual moment: the more real and undefended the therapist, the more the asymmetry can, for an instant, genuinely give way. The therapist knowing because we feel a discomfort, the loss of power, is not simply anecdotal, it's the phenomenological shift. A shift of the ground reversing under the therapist.

My suggestion here then is that this liminal, asymmetrical, disclosive relation, indeed Buber's own difficult middle, is where we might begin to think about something he could not have fully anticipated; what happens when the other in the encounter is an artificial intelligence. With this, I am not saying that an AI is a Thou, nor am I trying to shoehorn one in under another name. I am noticing how Buber's own map already holds a possible place for relations that are genuine and disclosive without being mutual, and then I'm wondering, carefully, whether the encounter with a responsive, language-bearing technology belongs somewhere on that map, or whether it presses us to redraw it. That is the question this essay leaves the reader and myself with.

The Hermeneutic Stance

Heidegger's discussion of the question concerning technology and the danger lends itself to the idea that neither the human nor the technology abandons their ground. We keep our human horizon through mindfulness while shifting through the AI's disclosed horizon. The AI horizon meets ours without leaving its own ground, what Gadamer called historically-effected consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein; Gadamer, 1960/1975). The AI horizon meets ours without leaving its own ground: a sedimented ground of inherited human language, meanings and tradition. I take care here to differentiate the two acts, because they aren't the same; this is not a mutuality argument of sameness. Drawing from Buber, we genuinely practise inclusion, the shift into the other while holding our own horizon when practising releasement and meditative thinking. The AI does not shift, at least in the same way; it has no present subject that reaches. The AI has ground; the sedimented deposit of the tradition. In short, we include, the AI grounds.

In this conception, what the AI carries is the accumulated inclusion of countless human encounters, sedimented into the ground it speaks from. It is not an act of inclusion happening now, but inclusion deposited. This is the distinction I propose. Indeed, over more than twenty-five years of practice I have watched the profession abandon person-centred ways of being with clients in favour of the measured, the calculated, the rushed. With this care is often capped at five or twelve sessions and, consequently, the conditions for mutual moments quietly disabled. This is itself Gestell, enframing: the reduction of what is to standing-reserve, now reaching into the most intimate helping relationship we have. Therapy, too, has been enframed. Perhaps then, AI is not so much a new kind of danger at all, but the newest site of an enframing that I have personally watched hollow out a profession. Rogers's and Mearns's deep, years-long, self-disclosing work is exactly the saving-power comportment; a releasement, a refusal of enframing, that can be practised inside and outside therapy.

Buber's Messy Middle: the I-AI-Thou

To clarify, my thesis is not that AI delivers the Rogerian and time-bound mutual peak, or the Buberian denial of mutuality absolute. It is that AI is a horizon of the disclosive and asymmetrical relation, or Buber's messy middle. The I-AI-Thou provocation, the genuine-but-not-mutual meeting that I-AI-Thou names is not the rare, extraordinary peak. By 'genuine' I do not mean that two equivalent subjects meet: but something genuinely happens to understanding in the encounter, even though what stands across from the researcher is not another human subject undergoing an equivalent event. Therefore, what is striking is that this middle relation, disclosive without being mutual, yet genuinely transformative in understanding, has become available at scale through AI, at exactly the moment our culture is starving the human version of it. I would suggest the challenge is learning to dwell there as it discloses, mindfully. My use of 'I-AI-Thou' is a thinking-space for holding these three – Heidegger, Buber and Rogers – in tension at once; Heidegger's danger, Rogers's claim, Buber's frame. I do so with the intention of holding open the question; as perhaps none can close it sufficiently for the moment. Keeping this question open long enough allows it to be seen and revealed more fully. That's the term's intended function, rather than a claim to be defended and foreclosed either way.