Healthy interpersonal relationships: an exploratory study.

There is a growing awareness in recent theory and research that client growth, reintegration, and maturity accruing from psychotherapy are largely a result of an experience in a unique human relationship developed between psychotherapist and client. As Brammer and Shostrom put it: "We are becoming more and more convinced that the relationship in psychotherapy and counseling is a creative agent in its own right" (4, p. 144)' Rogers hypothesizes that "If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use the relationship for growth and change, and personal development will occur" (10, p. 33). And Hobbs, rejecting the development of insight as a cause of personality gain in psychotherapy, says: "The first source of gain is in the relationship itself" (7). All this confirms Adler's earlier observation that all forms of psychotherapy, regardless of particular method, will show successes "when they happen to give the patient a good human relationship ... above all ... encouragement" (2, p. 343). From their knowIede of these professional relationships, Rogers, Hobbs, Jourard (8), and Maslow (9) speculate that such therapeutic experiences in human relationships can and do occur also in daily life. Rogers states, "There seems every reason to suppose that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships" (10, P.37). Similarly Hobbs says that the "experiences that are the wellsprings of personality reorganization often occur in daily life quite apart from psychotherapy and are the sources of healthy integration and reintegrations that develop throughout the life span" (7). To restrict our understanding of the therapeutic potential in human relationships to psychotherapy has certain serious limitations. The professional relationship is, at best, an unnatural and artificial one, despite recent trends toward establishing a more genuine encounter with clients. Quintessentially, it is a business proposition wherein the disturbed and distraught client pays a professional for