Helping the Helpless

Abstract

During part of the time that the author taught graduate student seminars in psychology at Harvard University from 1960 to 1963, he traveled weekly to a Catholic orphanage in New Bedford, Massachusetts. There, he and graduate students worked with social workers and nuns to develop a program in which older children learned to help younger children. Consequently, children of all ages took more responsibility for running the school and planning their lives. This report on the program, presented at the Northeast Regional Conference of the American Public Welfare Association, Boston, in September 1961, has never before been published. It demonstrates the author's "existential-transactional" theory of behavior change, in which transactional means that the therapist must abandon the role of expert and openly collaborate with the client in figuring out a solution to his or her problems. Existential means that the therapist must leave the safety of the consulting room and get out there in the field where the client is experiencing unique problems and will be the one to solve those problems, using flexible concepts and methods growing out of the unique, changing situation. The therapist's role is essentially that of a coach in a game where the star player is the client. The coach can help, can point out mistakes, can share wisdom. But, in the last analysis, the person who does the job is the one out there in the field. This article illustrates how clients can be helped to overcome helplessness by stimulating them to action rather than by "doing something to" them.