Critical Studies on the Psychotherapeutic Relationship in the Third Force in Psychology

Abstract

The third force of Psychology constituted itself conferring a central place for the psychotherapeutic relationship in the psychotherapeutic process. We investigated what three of its most influential authors — Carl Rogers, Rollo May and Irvin Yalom— wrote about it in order to understand their conceptions of therapeutic relationship. Due to the meagre scientific production on the subject in Brazil, it is essential to elaborate theoretical contributions for a critical analysis of these authors’ studies. To this end, the research methodology was the bibliographic review of classical texts produced by them as primary literature. Moreover, in a secondary literature, we made a narrative review of the most recent productions of the literature on the subject – between 2018 and 2021, in the SciELO, Google Scholar and PePSIC databases, with the following descriptors: Rogers and The Therapeutic Relationship; May and The Therapeutic Relationship; Yalom and The Therapeutic Relationship. The review brought the following conclusion: the attempt of the third force authors to elaborate prescriptions on the therapeutic relationship ends up being insufficient, because it is precisely in the attempt to separate it from the whole that the "between" of the relationship is unconsidered.