SEEING CLIENTS WITH AN ARTISTS EYE - PERCEPTUAL SIMULATION EXERCISES

This article offers some novel ideas to the age-old debate within the helping professions about how to gain balance between an analytical, c ognitive style of processing data and the more experiential and humani stic process of direct perception. Ideas drawn from the perceptual ski lls training are combined with therapeutic techniques from Gestalt the rapy. This marriage of ideas can be helpful in training counselors to understand and experience how techniques used by artists to see object s realistically can be applied to a counseling relationship.