Perhaps the most interesting fact about psychotherapy

Perhaps the most interesting fact about psychotherapy is that clients always think about their therapists more and more intensely than therapists think about their clients. Everyone who has been both a therapist and a client can attest to this. No one denies it. It holds true across all modalities of talk therapy.

Why is it that this happens? It seems fair to say what the nature of it is: it’s domination. The therapist is dominating the client, so the client thinks about and concerned with the therapists’ opinions and mind more than therapists are concerned with their clients. How does this happen, though? What allows it to happen? Therapy is just two people in a room talking. Why does this same phenomenon not happen when two people are in other rooms talking? Why doesn’t it happen, say, when two people are talking to each other at a coffee shop? Or, if it does happen there, why is it not predictable who will be the dominated one and who will do the dominating whereas it is predictable in therapy?

I think there’s a lot to learn from this. If we can think about what therapists and clients are doing which produces an authoritarian relationship or a relationship of domination, we might be able to learn a lot about what creates authority more generally or what creates it. Is it perhaps that this domination happens because therapists label themselves therapists and clients label themselves clients? Is it the label which creates the authority?