I don't view the term theme the same as you do Phil... no more than using the term "depression" or 'emergent self" or any other term here... another term as well as theme that suits me in this way is "pattern"... and there is much in our literature which speaks of theme (Polsters) and patterning etc.

I do agree, and like what Brendan has said, that any cognitising has the possibility to be detraction from the actual meeting, however I believe that words, movement, sound, tone, and all other forms of contact are a rich mode for each person to meet the other in counselling. Each is part of us as being whole.

I see this more as a balance between imagined and immediate realities and that as long as each are available for the therapist and client then a full meeting will happen...however once we spend too much time in one at the diminishing of the other we (cleint and counsellor) will experience less livelieness and fullness of contact.... the depressive self may even emerge as a theme, dare I say :-)

Maurice Nicholls talks of the visible and invisible reality of when we meet as people. How much of what we are is actually invisible, our hopes and dreams and love and wisdom. Yet this may manifest in the sense based reality of the physical world. The physicist David Bohm calls this implicate and explicate reality. I hear you favour not mistaking one for the other Phil (ie the construct of "theme" to replace the actual meeting in explicate reality)?

In quantum and post quantum physics this is the same as the classical world of our sense based experiences being different from the mathematics and experience of the quantum world, and Bohm notes that awareness and consciousness are a bridging process between quantum reality (invisible) and classical Newtownian reality (visible).

Some aspects of classical reality fall apart in the quatum world which is seen to go against common sense and intuition. Hence neither world or reality has the "inside track".

As Einstein said, for the time being we are stuck with two realities, matter and field. Or immediate and immagined, visible and invisble. Or talk of "theme" versus the direct experience of the other?

I like the dance between the two.

Brian