Personal Experience as Psychotherapeutical Concept at Work with Groups

Abstract

In a psychotherapeutical process is important to observe a client, as well ourselves as psychotherapist and that we try to be aware how is this process influencing us. Schuch (1977, pg.193) said that we can deal with this topic with one sentence: “Personal experience is what a person finds out about him self”. Or: “Personal experience is a way in which person figures out his social identity”. However, we will take some more space to deal with it. Through personal experience person should learn something about himself, e.g. behavioral samples that he uses in certain situations, what he feels etc. Although these statements make sense, they are also vague. If we look at them more precisely, we can see that this kind of operationalisations is not helping at a psychotherapeutical work. In this text we try to operationalize personal experience as a psychotherapeutical concept and to clarify similar uncertainties.