Describing the third person: Some difficulties in therapeutic communication

Attempts to clarify structural differentiations in human experience and, more relevantly, in psychotherapy, have been many. These clarifications have depended, in part, on examining the limits of what is abstract in specific experiential areas. Personal history has often been structurally delineated and used as an apparently nonabstract vehicle for describing the patient, the therapist, and as a basis for communicating an understanding of the therapeutic encounter. This paper examines the concept of personal history as one example of a kind of abstraction that suggests communicative understanding when in fact it is often only the maintenance of an illusion.