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Beauty and the Cyborg

Person-centred therapy (PCT) is stuck between the beautiful soul syndrome (‘Beauty’) and a mechanized view of therapy (‘Cyborg’). Enthused by a sense of its own purity and stirred by Christian narratives of love (often divine Agape rather than subversive and relational Eros), it wants to be effective in a world that it perceives as tainted. As the self-appointed conscience of the therapy world, PCT strives to maintain this self role by defending its principled ethos. At the same time, concerned about becoming irrelevant in a fast-moving world and wishing to be more effectual, it embraces neoliberalism and its bag of algorithms, data and market-driven ethics. Often separate, Beauty and the Cyborg are at times joined together in an unholy alliance within PCT. After examining both manifestations, this chapter charts a way out, drawing insights from organismic psychology, the roots of PCT and from literature. Introduction From its inception as client-centered therapy, PCT has been affected by the beautiful soul syndrome and an unspoken sense of moral superiority over other orientations. Like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, we person-centred therapists can be relied upon to give voice to the conscience of the profession and – also like Jiminy Cricket – for producing little effect other than the comfort of hearing noble-sounding words spoken with conviction and a pleasant rhetorical flourish. Among the various noble words gaining currency in person-centred literature, love is becoming dominant. It shows up in person-centred literature in secular garb and in full theological regalia. Talking about love will illustrate some of the traits of the beautiful soul syndrome that afflicts the PCA. The eagerness of some person-centred practitioners to see the approach accepted by the Powers prompted them to adopt wholesale the language, modality and worldview of the 2 latter. This is when Beauty turns into the Cyborg – in science fiction, a creature that is part human, part machine. Patent examples of this phenomenon can be observed in sectors of academia, from psychology journals to the teaching of PCT in universities and therapy institutes to the style and content of presentations of person-centred-related ideas at international conferences and symposia. Within these scenarios, very little distinguishes PCT from other branches of academic psychology except for its humane vocabulary that cheeringly reminds us, as in a nature documentary watched on a computer screen, of the existence of trees in a real forest. I believe both stances have value: Beauty and the Cyborg have something important to tell us about our current predicament as person-centred therapists navigating the complexity of a neoliberal landscape. Hence, rather than straightforward disapproval of either the naivety of Beauty or the frostiness of the Cyborg, this chapter maps out a third route that capitalizes on both while appealing to the key principle of the organism (Goldstein, 1995; Rogers, 1961). PCT, understood as an organismic psychology (Tudor & Worrall, 2006; Tudor, 2010) has a great deal to contribute to current debate provided it can expand on the notion of the organism and include the non-human – both within and without the human. Person-centred, Human-centred, Self-centred. PCT is stuck. Not only is it trapped within its vague notion of person hence oblivious to new emergent phenomena (Moreira, 2012, 2016) that c renew existence and re-establish exhilarating complicities with a dynamic world of becoming outside the narrow confines of personhood. It is also stuck with its notion of presence, (mis)understood metaphysically as the attribute of a spiritually-gifted therapist rather than, as Rud (2015) has been at pains to explain for some time, as “mutually constituted” (p. 5), as belonging, I would add, to the neutral dimension of affect (Massumi, 2000; Jameson, 2014). Above all, PCT is stuck within