Here’s a short, personal letter version—warm, direct, and readable in one sitting. I’ll keep it human, not “paper-ish,” and address Eric directly.
Dear Eric,
I wanted to share a few thoughts with you, informally, about something I’ve been working on recently—a comparison between Life Witness: Evolution of the Psychotherapist (Karasu, 2013) and a still-emerging practice I call 菊次郎十六式.
Karasu’s book has stayed with me because of its quiet confidence: the idea that a therapist matures beyond schools and techniques, and that—eventually—presence itself becomes therapeutic. I read Life Witness less as a manual than as a life-map: becoming a certain kind of person so that therapy no longer needs to announce itself.
菊次郎十六式, by contrast, is something I don’t yet know how to define—and that is deliberate. It doesn’t aspire to be a new model or school. If anything, it keeps asking a different question. Not “What should a therapist become?” but “How should one stand, so as not to block life?”
Where Karasu speaks of authentic presence, 菊次郎 speaks—more modestly—of gesture: offering tea, leaving a pause, not demanding a response, allowing things (and people) to return to their proper place. The image is less the seasoned professional and more the roadside companion, the slightly unclassifiable figure who makes a moment livable.
I don’t see these as opposing views. I see them as complementary tensions. Karasu gives us a telos of professional maturation. 菊次郎 insists on restraint—on not turning that maturation into another form of mastery. One is about becoming a healer; the other, perhaps, about not standing in the way.
I wanted to share this with you not as a finished theory, but as a conversation-in-progress. If Life Witness is about witnessing life through the therapist’s being, then 菊次郎 might be about witnessing the world—history, ruins, objects, silence—without trying to claim it.
Thanks for reading this small note. I’d love to hear how it resonates with your own sense of practice, or where it feels off.
Warmly,
Kelly
If you want, I can also do:
- a slightly more poetic version, or
- a more clinically grounded version (same letter, different emphasis).
Just tell me which mood you want.