I applaud Simon Proudlock (‘Presenting a united front’, therapy today, April 2008) when he celebrates the diversity of modalities and styles in which counsellors work. I was particularly pleased at his mention of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Twelve-step groups on the AA model rarely get any mention. Could it be that some counsellors are suspicious of clients who might be recovering without professional help? My own personal experience of such groups over nearly 17 years is that they can provide an extraordinary foundation of support and trust, which complements all sorts of other therapeutic work, whether with counsellors, healers, homeopaths, and the great plethora of alternatives; all of which have something to offer, and none of which – I agree with Proudlock again – is to be seen as the truth. And that includes twelve-step groups.

Where I cannot agree is that we are all doing the same thing. Turn back to the article on ‘Supershrinks’ in the same issue and I find myself in a world that is completely alien to anything that I understand counselling to be. This might be a question of another style that I simply don’t understand. I think, however, that Scott Miller, Mark Hubble and Barry Duncan’s arguments are based on fundamentally false premises.

Even if their comparisons between counsellors and athletes or musicians were valid, which I can’t in any case accept, I’m not convinced that any of the writers has ever actually met such people. I have the peculiar experience of having a brother who used to be a world-class athlete, and have also consorted with some extremely gifted musicians. Yes, the truly great ones do distinguish themselves through the sheer amount of hard work they put in. The ‘supershrink’ argument, however, gets things back to front. The reason they are able to work so hard is because their natural talent fuels the work. I have met other musicians who certainly work as hard, but who do not have that essential spark.

Talent is the lynchpin that enables everything else. It is the quality of talent that defines the quality of the work, not the other way round. For most people it really wouldn’t matter how much training they put in, they will never run six miles in 27 minutes, any more than a second-rate pianist, however hard he or she practices, will ever be able to perform one of the great piano concertos, still less with that immeasurable quality that defines greatness. Believe me, I’ve tried! And someone with limited intuition can ask their clients for feedback until they are blue in the face; they will never really understand the subtler aspects of such feedback. I’m glad to say, in any case, that no counsellor has ever put me in such an uncomfortable position.

As for ‘computing your baseline’ or ‘measuring yields’ and ‘improving outcomes’, I have no idea what this means. And when Miller et al. say, ‘When it works well, client and therapist reach and maintain agreement about where they are going and the means by which they will get there,’ I ask: what has happened to not knowing? What has happened to finding solutions or answers which, by their very nature, could not be predicted? This is what I mean when I say that we are not all doing the same thing.

Wiliam Johnston