Explorations in the uses of language in psychotherapy: simple empathic statements

I submit these ideas with hesitation. They seem to rest on a particular assumption widely at variance with contemporary practice and itself difficult to state. The prevailing assumption has been that the content of a person's mental life, symptoms, or experience lay in that person's mind, and that by asking questions, listening, in various ways making ourselves receptive, we could penetrate that mental life. In this traditional manner of thinking, the language of penetration has been secondary to the material being reached. In contrast, I suspect that the language of investigation and therapy is as important as the matter being investigated or treated--that in fact the two bear a symbiotic relationship to each other.