Updated November 2026 · By Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S

Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923) describes two ways of standing toward the world. In I-It we observe, sort and use. In I-Thou we meet another as a whole person. Psychotherapy took the idea up through Carl Rogers, the Jung-trained psychotherapist Hans Trüb and Buber’s translator Maurice Friedman, who argued that healing happens in that meeting and not in technique alone.

My argument is narrower, and I think more useful to a working therapist. Buber’s best gift to therapy is not the I-Thou as an ideal of equal meeting. It is the objection he raised to Rogers on a stage in Ann Arbor in 1957: a helping relationship is real meeting under a limit. The therapist can try to stand on the client’s side of the room. The client cannot be asked to do the same for the therapist. What heals, on Buber’s account, is confirmation, being seen as the person you are trying to become, and not acceptance alone. An honest asymmetry, rather than a pretended equality, is what makes meeting possible in a therapy room.

Who Martin Buber was

Buber was born in Vienna on 8 February 1878. When he was three his mother left, and he was raised by his paternal grandparents in Lemberg, now Lviv. He saw her only once more, in his early thirties, and described that visit as a “mismeeting” that taught him what genuine meeting was.^{1, 2} The philosopher of relation began with a relationship that failed.

As a teenager, tormented by the problem of infinite time, he found relief in Kant’s Prolegomena.^{1, 2} He studied philosophy, art history and psychology in four cities and briefly considered psychiatry, until he saw how patients were treated. His 1904 dissertation dealt with the problem of individuation in Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme, a word that would come back when he quarreled with Jung.¹

He made his name retelling Hasidic tales, edited the monthly Der Jude from 1916 to 1924, and published Ich und Du in 1923.² From 1923 he taught Jewish religious philosophy and ethics at the University of Frankfurt, and from 1925 he translated the Hebrew Bible into German with Franz Rosenzweig, finishing alone in 1961.¹ He gave up his post in 1933 to preempt dismissal as a Jew, organized Jewish adult education under the Nazis, and left for Jerusalem and a chair in social philosophy at the Hebrew University in 1938. He argued for a binational state shared by Jews and Arabs, and died in Jerusalem on 13 June 1965.^{1, 2} Privately, the philosopher of the I-Thou let very few people call him by his first name.² The I-Thou was never a personality style; it is something that happens between people, sometimes difficult ones.

I-It and I-Thou: what the book says

I and Thou opens with two “basic words,” I-Thou and I-It, and the claim that the I is different in each.³ In I-It I experience something: I note its qualities, classify it, measure it and use it. Buber did not condemn this mode. The It-world gives us science and every practical skill, and no one can live without it; what troubled him was a life lived only there.¹ Even so, Rosenzweig complained that the book gave the I-Thou “a cripple for an opponent.”² Clinicians should remember the objection: diagnosis and treatment planning are I-It activities, and necessary ones.

In I-Thou I do not experience the other as a bundle of traits. I meet the other as a whole, with my whole being. Buber’s line Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung is “All real living is meeting” in Ronald Gregor Smith’s 1937 translation and “All actual life is encounter” in Walter Kaufmann’s 1970 version, which renders Du with the plainer “You.”^{3, 4} The meeting cannot be manufactured. The other encounters us, Buber wrote, “by grace” and “cannot be found by seeking,” yet answering is still our own act.³ Nor does any meeting last. Every Thou must become an It again as we describe, remember and use what we met.¹

The relation runs in three spheres: with nature, with other people, and with spirit, which meets us in the forms of art and thought. All three point toward the “eternal Thou,” Buber’s name for God, who remains always other even when fixed religion turns this Thou, too, into an It.¹ “All names of God remain hallowed,” he wrote, “because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.”³ The idea has old roots: Augustine’s Confessions already staged self-examination as a prayerful dialogue with God.⁵

The distinction also works as social criticism. Writing from a Birmingham jail on 16 April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed Buber’s terms to argue that segregation substitutes an I-It relationship for an I-Thou relationship and reduces persons to things.⁶ I-It is not only a private lapse of attention; laws and institutions can build it in. Buber himself did not escape this: the political scientist Amal Jamal has argued that, by Buber’s own standard, his writing treated Palestinians in a largely patronizing way rather than as equals.²

Distance, confirmation and inclusion

The Buber who matters most to clinicians is the later one. In “Distance and Relation” (1951) he argued that relation presupposes a primal setting-at-a-distance: I can only meet someone I first recognize as truly other than me.^{1, 2} Closeness that erases the difference is not relation.

Out of distance comes confirmation. Because a person experiences himself as unfinished, Buber argued, he needs another to recognize not only what he is but what he can become. Confirmation is therefore not the same as acceptance or unconditional affirmation. Sometimes it means helping someone against an immediate inclination for the sake of who they are trying to be, which is why helping relationships such as teaching and healing are necessarily asymmetrical.¹

The capacity that makes confirmation possible Buber called inclusion (Umfassung), or “imagining the real.” He set it against empathy as he understood that word. In empathy I lose my own standpoint in absorption in the other. In inclusion I live through a shared event from the other person’s side without giving up my own.¹

In 1957, at the psychiatrist Leslie Farber’s invitation, Buber gave the William Alanson White Memorial Lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry.^{1, 7} “Elements of the Interhuman” names the main obstacle to dialogue as the duality of being and seeming: managing the impression we make instead of showing up as we are.^{1, 8} “Guilt and Guilt Feelings” faults psychotherapy for trying to resolve guilt feelings without attending to the damaged relationships at their root.^{1, 9}

The 1957 dialogue with Carl Rogers

On 18 April 1957 Buber sat down with Carl Rogers before an audience at the University of Michigan, with Maurice Friedman moderating.^{2, 10} Buber was 79 and Rogers 55. Rogers had built client-centered therapy partly on Otto Rank’s will therapy and on the relationship therapy that the Philadelphia social workers Jessie Taft and Virginia Robinson developed from it.¹¹ That same year he published his “necessary and sufficient conditions” of therapeutic change, which put empathy, unconditional positive regard and congruence at the center of the work.¹² Those conditions are Rogers’s, not Buber’s. In Ann Arbor, Rogers likened the moments of real change in his sessions to Buber’s I-Thou.^{10, 13}

The first disagreement was over mutuality. Rogers suggested that in the moments that matter, therapist and client meet as equals. Buber disagreed. The client comes for help and the therapist does not. The therapist can practice inclusion, imagining the client’s side, but the client is in no position to return the favor. Friedman later summarized Buber’s position as a “normative limitation of mutuality,” rooted both in the structure of the therapy relationship and in the limited resources of the person who comes for help.¹⁰

The second disagreement went deeper. Rogers held that when a therapist accepts a client fully, the client actualizes himself, because human nature can be trusted. Buber answered that acceptance is where the relationship begins, not where it ends. Healing through meeting also needs confirmation, which includes helping the person in the inner conflict between finding a direction and being pulled into an aimless whirl. Rogers thought people basically good. Buber thought them neither good nor evil but polar, capable of direction or of drift. For Rogers, dialogue served self-actualization; for Buber, self-actualization was a by-product of dialogue.^{1, 10}

Kenneth Cissna and Rob Anderson, who published a new transcript in 1997, found the conversation strained by assigned roles and silent audiences, yet still a genuine dialogue: a practical accomplishment, not an ideal seldom realized.^{13, 14}

Who was right? Both, in different registers. Rogers was right that both people can be changed in a session. Buber was right that the frame is not mutual and should not pretend to be. The client discloses and is exposed; the therapist holds the time, the confidentiality and the responsibility. A therapist who asks for equal footing has quietly asked the client to take care of the therapist.

Research supports the relationship’s importance without settling Buber’s deeper claim. A 2018 meta-analysis of 295 studies covering more than 30,000 patients found that the therapeutic alliance correlated with outcome at about r = .28.¹⁵ Companion meta-analyses found correlations of r = .28 for therapist empathy and r = .23 for congruence, and a smaller association for positive regard (g = .28, which its authors call small).^{16, 17, 18} A correlation of .28 accounts for about 8 percent of the variance in outcome, and correlation is not cause. Researchers still argue over whether the alliance heals by itself, follows from treatment that is already working, or partly reflects a client’s general capacity for relationships.¹⁹ “Relationship, not technique” is too simple. Both are carried by the same person in the same hour.

Buber and Jung

Buber’s quarrel with depth psychology began inside it. His earliest lecture on psychology, “On the Ensoulment of the World,” was given in 1923 at the Psychological Club in Zurich that Jung had established. Buber read Jung extensively; by the Stanford Encyclopedia’s account, Jung did not return the attention, and the two never corresponded directly.²

The open break came in 1952. In “Religion and Modern Thinking,” first published in the journal Merkur and collected that year in Eclipse of God, Buber argued that Jung reduced religion to a content of the psyche, at the expense of a God who is really other, and that Jung’s claims about the psychic origin of belief went beyond what empirical psychology can know.^{2, 20} Jung answered in the same journal with “Religion and Psychology: A Reply to Martin Buber,” and Buber replied once more.^{20, 21} Jung, for his part, dismissed critics bound to traditional systems of thought as unable to understand him, and in a 1960 exchange of letters involving a doctoral student he said Buber lacked practical experience in depth psychology and knew nothing of the autonomy of complexes.² Buber’s deeper objection was that subsuming reality under psychological categories cuts a person off from relation.¹

The clinical stakes ran through one man. Hans Trüb (1889–1949) began as a student of Jung, became Buber’s long-time friend and developed a dialogical approach to therapy.² His book Heilung aus der Begegnung appeared after his death, in 1951, with an introduction by Buber published in English as “Healing Through Meeting.”^{1, 22, 23} Half a century later, Barbara Stephens argued in the Journal of Analytical Psychology that the Buber-Jung disputations, more than the Freud-Jung split, are the better lens for the Jungian community’s conflicts over clinical practice and candidate training, and that a more dialogical approach to clinical material may prove more fruitful.²⁴

From inside a practice that offers Jungian depth therapy, I think the dispute poses a false choice. Dream images and disowned parts of the self are worked with inside a relationship, often the first place they become bearable to look at, and Jung’s influences and philosophy are wider than Buber allowed. Buber’s warning still stands: an analysis that turns everyone in a patient’s life into a projection has stopped listening to that life.

Dialogical psychotherapy after Buber

Maurice Friedman, Buber’s American translator and biographer, almost single-handedly introduced him to American readers, and he carried Buber into psychotherapy as well. He moderated the Rogers dialogue and developed what he called dialogical psychotherapy, or “healing through meeting.”^{2, 25} In The Healing Dialogue in Psychotherapy (1985) and later articles he grounded therapy in “the interhuman,” set out ten elements of a dialogical approach, and traced Buber’s influence through relational psychoanalysis and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy’s contextual family therapy.^{25, 26, 27, 28} His edited volume Martin Buber and the Human Sciences (1996) includes clinical chapters on confirmation and on resistance.²⁹

Laura Perls, a founder of Gestalt therapy, counted Buber among her teachers. Ludwig Binswanger, one of the two Swiss psychiatrists behind Daseinsanalysis, corresponded with Buber and drew on his thinking.^{1, 2} The Buber-Rogers exchange has its own entry in Emmy van Deurzen and Raymond Kenward’s Dictionary of Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling, and van Deurzen’s four-dimension model gives the social world a place of its own.³⁰ Buber himself refused the existentialist label. He knew of no philosophy of existence, he said, that let otherness in far enough, which is the heart of his difference from Heidegger’s account of Dasein.^{1, 2}

I know of no controlled trial of dialogical psychotherapy as a distinct method; Friedman argued for it through theory and case illustration. A 2015 meta-analysis of existential therapies found 21 randomized trials, 15 of them with usable data. Six trials of meaning therapies showed what the authors called large effects on meaning in life (d = 0.65) and moderate effects on anxiety and depression (d = 0.47), while two trials of experiential-existential therapy showed no significant effects. The authors stressed that the studies were few and of low quality, and that the clearest support was for structured meaning interventions with physically ill patients.³¹

What this looks like in therapy

The It-world has its place. Intake questions, diagnosis and symptom measures are I-It work, and they protect clients. Trouble starts when a person is met only as a case of something.

Meeting cannot be scheduled. No technique produces an I-Thou moment, and a therapist who promises one is selling something. A therapist can remove obstacles: stop performing competence, notice when both people have slipped into seeming, and stay present when something real happens, which is often quieter than people expect.

Asymmetry protects the client. The therapist tries to see the session from the client’s side. The client should not have to manage the therapist’s feelings or reassure them. Boundaries are not coldness; on Buber’s account, the distance that marks another person as truly other is what makes relation possible.

Confirmation is more than validation. Validating a feeling and confirming a person are different acts. Confirmation can mean telling someone, carefully, that a pattern they defend does not fit the person they are trying to become. In trauma and parts-based work it often means welcoming a protective pattern and its history while speaking to the larger person who cannot be reduced to it.

Real guilt deserves repair. Following Buber’s lecture on guilt, a therapist does not talk someone out of every guilt feeling. Some guilt was learned from people who used it to control. Some answers to a real harm, and there the work is honest accounting and, where possible, repair.

If questions about meaning, relationship and responsibility are what bring you to therapy, our page on existential therapy in Birmingham describes how we work with them. You can also contact us to ask whether one of our therapists in Hoover, or by teletherapy across Alabama, is a good fit.

References

1. Scott, S. (n.d.). Martin Buber (1878–1965). Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/buber/
2. Zank, M., & Braiterman, Z. (2026). Martin Buber. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision May 12, 2026). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/
3. Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)
4. Buber, M. (1937). I and Thou (R. G. Smith, Trans.). T. & T. Clark. (Original work published 1923)
5. Tornau, C. (2024). Augustine of Hippo. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (substantive revision April 26, 2024). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
6. King, M. L., Jr. (2000). Why we can’t wait. Signet Classic. (Original work published 1964)
7. Farber, L. H. (1957). The William Alanson White Memorial Lectures, fourth series, by Martin Buber: Introduction. Psychiatry, 20(2), 95–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1957.11023079
8. Buber, M. (1957). Elements of the interhuman. Psychiatry, 20(2), 105–113. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1957.11023081
9. Buber, M. (1957). Guilt and guilt feelings. Psychiatry, 20(2), 114–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1957.11023082
10. Friedman, M. (1994). Reflections on the Buber-Rogers dialogue. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 34(1), 46–65. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678940341004
11. deCarvalho, R. J. (1999). Otto Rank, the Rankian circle in Philadelphia, and the origins of Carl Rogers’ person-centered psychotherapy. History of Psychology, 2(2), 132–148. https://doi.org/10.1037/1093-4510.2.2.132
12. Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357
13. Cissna, K. N., & Anderson, R. (1994). The 1957 Martin Buber-Carl Rogers dialogue, as dialogue. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 34(1), 11–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678940341003
14. Anderson, R., & Cissna, K. N. (1997). The Martin Buber–Carl Rogers dialogue: A new transcript with commentary. State University of New York Press.
15. Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
16. Elliott, R., Bohart, A. C., Watson, J. C., & Murphy, D. (2018). Therapist empathy and client outcome: An updated meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 399–410. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000175
17. Kolden, G. G., Wang, C.-C., Austin, S. B., Chang, Y., & Klein, M. H. (2018). Congruence/genuineness: A meta-analysis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 424–433. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000162
18. Farber, B. A., Suzuki, J. Y., & Lynch, D. A. (2018). Positive regard and psychotherapy outcome: A meta-analytic review. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 411–423. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000171
19. Zilcha-Mano, S. (2017). Is the alliance really therapeutic? Revisiting this question in light of recent methodological advances. American Psychologist, 72(4), 311–325. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0040435
20. Buber, M. (2015). Eclipse of God: Studies in the relation between religion and philosophy. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc777pc (Original work published 1952)
21. Jung, C. G. (2023). Religion and psychology: A reply to Martin Buber (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 18. The symbolic life (pp. 663–670). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032652047-500 (Original work published 1952)
22. Trüb, H. (1951). Heilung aus der Begegnung: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Psychologie C. G. Jungs. Klett.
23. Buber, M. (1957). Pointing the way: Collected essays (M. Friedman, Trans.). Harper & Brothers.
24. Stephens, B. D. (2001). The Martin Buber-Carl Jung disputations: Protecting the sacred in the battle for the boundaries of analytical psychology. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 46(3), 455–491. https://doi.org/10.1111/1465-5922.00257
25. Friedman, M. (2002). Martin Buber and dialogical psychotherapy. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 42(4), 7–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/002216702237122
26. Friedman, M. (1985). The healing dialogue in psychotherapy. Jason Aronson.
27. Friedman, M. S. (2008). Buber and dialogical therapy: Healing through meeting. The Humanistic Psychologist, 36(3–4), 298–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873260802350014
28. Friedman, M. S. (1989). Martin Buber and Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy: The role of dialogue in contextual therapy. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 26(3), 402–409. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0085452
29. Friedman, M. (Ed.). (1996). Martin Buber and the human sciences. State University of New York Press.
30. van Deurzen, E., & Kenward, R. (2011). Buber-Rogers dialogue. In Dictionary of existential psychotherapy and counselling. SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446220771.n81
31. Vos, J., Craig, M., & Cooper, M. (2015). Existential therapies: A meta-analysis of their effects on psychological outcomes. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 83(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037167