From the Editor - Page 2

Indeed, central to therapy is the experience of being intensely alive to the face-to-faceness of the clinical encounter. As Nancy Napier shows us in her piece, "Finding the Pulse," the most memorable moments in our practices are those in which there's a shift from life that's just happening to "lived experience." In fact, in its moment-to-moment unpredictability, Robert Taibbi writes, psychotherapy shares something with the up-on-the-tightrope quality of improv theater. In both, nobody knows exactly where things will go, but the process itself heightens the enlivening prospect of not knowing how the story will end.

Finally, being face-to-face with another human being is akin to standing face-to- face with the day-to-day mystery of existence. At those moments when we grasp the fuller, deeper possibilities that existence offers, writes Fred Wistow, "the trance of habit and routine is broken, and a door opens onto something greater than the small and simple confines of your everyday life. At those moments, you manage to catch a glimpse of the world—stark and separate, beautiful and fierce—as, unmediated, it reveals itself to you." Revelation—there it is again, right in front of us, if we can only awaken from the reverie that we too often mistake for life itself.

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