The Most Human of All People

This is a meditation upon a puzzling incident of unconscious communication involving a remark of Harry Stack Sullivan's. The essay explores some of Sullivan's views on unconscious communication and the nature of client pathology and then relates them to the theoretical issue of whether (as Hanna and others have recently contended) therapists ought aim at helping clients construct a complex intersubjective reality, rather than hierarchically offering to replace client's views with the therapist's truth. Relying upon the work of Searles, Casement, and Schafer, I side cautiously with the intersubjectivist position, while acknowledging its potential romanticism and concomitant dangers of sentimentality and irrationalism.