Mahrer On Therapy

In the experiential model — a person is made up of "potentials for experiencing" and their relationships.

This model pictures a person as made up of potential for experiencing. These are available kinds of experiencing that the particular person can have. The package of potentials in one person may be essentially unique to that person. For example, inside one person may be potentialities for experiencing; tenderness, gentleness, softness, playfulness, silliness, violence, whimsicalness, explosiveness, destructiveness, strength, firmness, toughness; an experiencing of being mischievous, devilish, wicked; being dominant, controlling, in charge; being close to, one with, intimate; being risky, daring, adventurous; an experiencing of being docile, compliant, yielding.

 
That is all there is to the structure of a person. Nothing more. There is no ego or ids, no personality traits, no needs or drives, no unconscious impulses, no psychodynamics or psychic defenses, no cognitions or core schemas. Nothing.

Some potentials for experiencing are closer to the surface. They help account for the way the person acts, behaves, responds and reacts, makes sense of, builds, and constructs that person's world, how the person exists and operates in that world. These are called operating potentials for experiencing.

Other potentials for experiencing are much deeper, far from the surface. They are the underground foundation beneath the operating potential. They are called deeper potentials for experiencing. Their nature and content generally vary from person to person. There are no universal deeper potentials for experiencing, no shared commonality. At the base, each of us may be quite different.

 
In addition to potentials for experiencing, there are relationships between and among these potentials. They may be friendly, accepting, welcoming, positive, integrative, or they may be unfriendly, rejecting, distancing, negative, disintegrative.

Potentials for experiencing and relationships between these potentials - that is all there is to this model of human beings. The picture is rather clean and simple, especially in contrast to all the concepts and constructs, pieces and bits, processes and dynamics, that are present in so many other theories, and are absent and unnecessary in this model.

One builds one's own personal world to enable one's own personal experiencing

This model depicts a person as building, creating, organizing and external world to serve as appropriate and useful situational contexts to enable the experiencing it is important for this person to experience. And the external world is shaped and organized as externalizations of the person's own deeper potentials, again to enable the experiencing of what is important for this person to experience.

There are ways that a person builds and constructs his or her own person external world. One is that the real external world presents itself to the person, and the person then receives it, uses it, gives it sense and meaning, in the person's own important way. Second, the external world is merely available, a rich warehouse or marketplace of stuff for the person to select from and use in the ways and for the purposes that are important for this person. Third, the person and the external world can work together, cooperate together, to create and build what is important for this person to create and build. Finally, the person can actively create and fashion the kind of external world it is important for the person to create and fashion. Whatever ways the person uses, the person is the one who builds, shapes, creates, constructs, gives meaning to, and uses the external worlds, and the person may use building blocks that are quite real or are utterly and fancifully unreal.

What gets ordinary existence going and keeps it in motion and where is it to go?

For virtually every person, existence throughout one's entire life consists of (1) providing for a safe, limited degree of experiencing of potentials for experiencing, but not too much, and (2) maintaining the present state of integrative-good or disintegrative-bad relationships between potential for experiencing. By means of behaviors and the building of appropriate external worlds, the person enables a safe degree of mild-moderate experiencing to preserve and maintain the system of potentials for experiencing, and to preserve and maintain the state of relationships between potentials, whether relationships are integrative-good or disintegrative-bad.

In this model, there are no grand intrinsic forces, and no grand destines, payoffs, elevated end-states. There is no notion of basic needs, drives, impulses, motivations, sources of energy or power. There is no notion of growth forces, actualization forces, built-in stages of human growth and development. There is no notion of intrinsic biological or social or psychological grand pushes or pulls, forces or powers. There is no notion of end-states of psychological maturity, uplifted states of psychological maturity, uplifted states of psychological health, end-states or destines of growth and development.

Movement toward an optimal state requires radical, transformational shifts into becoming a qualitative new person

According to the experiential perspective, a person will remain essentially the same person throughout life unless, and here is the wonderful opportunity and risk, the person is ready and willing and able to undergo a qualitative, radical, transformational shift. Then it is possible to become a qualitatively new person, a person who is closer to the optimal person that this person is capable of becoming. Becoming an optimal person consists of two qualitative changes.

One is that deeper potential for experiencing become operating potentials for experiencing. What is deeper inside becomes and integral part of who and what the qualitatively new person is. As you become a qualitatively new person, the risk, the almost certain risk, is that parts of the person you were, and parts of that person's own world, will drop out, fade away, no longer exist. This process of deeper potentials for experiencing becoming integral parts of the qualitatively new person is called actualization of deeper potentials for experiencing.

The related qualitative change is that relationships between potential for experiencing become more welcoming, loving, accepting, integrated. This too is a radical transformation in the very person that you are, in your feelings, thoughts, actions, interactions, and in your own personal world. This process is called integration of relationships among potentials for experiencing.

The experiential model offers the possibility of becoming the optimal person you are capable of becoming. This is the precious and powerful gift of each experiential session. The opportunity is here. The risks are powerful. So are the opportunities.

Mahrer, A. R. (2001). Experiential Psychotherapy. In R. Corsini (Ed.), Handbook of innovative therapy, (pp. 218-229). New York: Wiley.