Buber's Philosophy as the Basis for Dialogical Psychotherapy and Contextual Therapy

Abstract

This article is divided into three sections. The first is an overview of Buber's philosophy of dialogue and his philosophical anthropology. The middle section spells this out in terms of the movement of dialogical psychotherapy in general, including contextual therapy, and discusses books by associated psychotherapists. The third section gives a somewhat detailed overview of contextual therapy as it has developed on the foundations of Buber's common order of human existence and his existential guilt and as it recapitulates such Buberian emphases as meeting others and holding one's ground when one meets them, the normative limitation of mutuality in therapy, imagining the real, and repairing the injured order of existence. It also adds to the discussion of the books of Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, the founder of contextual therapy (by himself and with Geraldine Spark and Barbara Krasner, respectively), a discussion of the growing edge of contextual therapy as it is set forth in Barbara Krasner and Austin Joyce's 1995 book Catalyzing TRuth and Trust: The Contextualization of Direct Address.