To the Reader Upon Opening This Book:
This is the ninth edition of The Art of Helping. Here is the data. More than 700,000 copies have been sold over three decades. Literally, millions of people have been trained in helping skills. Many millions more have been recipients of these skills. The effects upon hundreds of thousands of these recipients have been researched. We are very pleased with the results.
Perhaps the most important thing that I can say is this: “We have been an important part of an interpersonal skills revolution.” This revolution began less than one-half century ago with the work of neo-Freudians like Sullivan, Horney, and Fromm, was continued by the Client-Centered and Existential Schools, and finally was adopted by the Behaviorist and Trait-and-Factor Schools. In 1957, less than 50 years ago, Rogers formulated “the necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change”: empathy, regard, congruence. We were so privileged to have these giants as our intellectual ancestors.
It was left to us to operationalize these dimensions. It is, after all, the technological manifestations of our concepts that move humankind to change. We were successful in developing the first documented systematic interpersonal skills, or IPS, programs. Contrary to earlier theorists like Rogers, this meant that the skills were operationally defined and therefore learnable and achievable. They made a difference in the lives of the helpers as well as in the lives of the helpees.
In 1971, we published the first IPS model in The Art of Helping. The impact of this work has been dramatic. Before 1971, there were few references in the literature to skills of any kind, let alone interpersonal and helping skills. Since then, the references have become voluminous. Indeed, the words interpersonal and skills are linked together in a growthful embrace. To be sure, all other IPS programs, however packaged, are derived from this original source. We are as proud today of The Art of Helping as we were then.
More importantly, The Art of Helping served to introduce the terms “responding” and “relating.” Before 1971, people almost never interacted with others by using the pronoun you, let alone statements such as “You feel ____” or “You feel ____ because ____.” Since then, most productive dialogue has been based upon making interchangeable “You feel” responses. In other words, for the first time in human history, people actually began to relate consciously and skillfully by entering the frames of reference of others. Imagine that! Humankind survived millions of prehistoric years to live ten thousand years as supposedly civilized people, yet its members never learned to relate to one another. Perhaps that is why much of human history is so pathetic.
And this is precisely the point that I would like to conclude with! With relating, humans may empathically enter the experience of any phenomena—not just human experiences. They may generate more useful information, growthful people, thinking organizations, expanding markets, productive communities, resourceful environments, generative sciences, and even new universes. Anything and everything is possible! Without relating, nothing is possible!
So learn your lessons well. This may be the first step in a very long human journey. It has been for me. The life you save may be your civilization’s!
Good Luck and Great Love,
Robert R. Carkhuff