A striking article in Therapy Today compares counsellors and prostitutes. Kevin Chandler argues that they both provide ‘intimate personal services’. Most people expect to give and receive both sexual stimulation and satisfaction and attentive, caring listening, empathic understanding and encouragement freely within a close personal relationship. A paid service providing such help raises problems of authenticity. Does the paid counsellor fake empathy for the same reason that a prostitute fakes orgasm? The therapeutic relationship is an artifice in that it does not arise naturally and is built up in place of something else, However, it is real for the purpose that it is constructed. Chandler describes them as ‘on temporary loan’ to enable people to offer and receive help. To allow them to work, people ‘suspend disbelief’ in the same way that they do when reading a novel. Clients accept that the practitioner is a caring and helpful person, provided she acts out her role sufficiently well. They regain their disbelief if she fails to perform adequately.

Chandler, K. (2009) Turning tricks. Therapy Today. 20(3): 14-17.