Friendship and therapy
Throughout my time as a therapist, I’ve had one main objection against therapy. It’s an objection that can best be understood – and potentially solved – through the lens of friendship and witnessing.
Have you ever lost a friend because your ideas of friendship diverged? Sometimes, it’s as simple as that—you lose a friend because your conceptualizations of friendship aren’t compatible.
This is how I understand friendship at its core: two people voluntarily spending time together, sharing space, without placing too many requirements on that space. A friendship is about two people who want to witness each other.
But others might want something different from a friendship. They may expect the friendship to result in something—a product or a work of art. Perhaps they need their friendships to serve a purpose or be of some practical use.
Knowing how deeply supportive, healing, and beautiful a friendship can be when a friend sees you, understands you, and holds you in high regard, but then also experiencing how uncomfortable it feels when a friend seems to want something specific out of the relationship, has made me wonder: why isn’t it one of the most researched topics within the psychological field?
It’s not that friendship is an underexposed topic in general, though, especially not if you turn to the realm of philosophy.
A Friendship of Utility, Pleasure, or Virtue
Probably most significantly, there’s Aristotle, the philosophy of friendship’s first-mover. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle categorizes friendships into three types, depending on their foundation: utility, pleasure, or virtue.
He explained that friendships of utility and pleasure are always characterized by a degree of uncertainty because they are based on fulfilling certain needs. They are built on an underlying contract that they must provide reciprocal benefit, whether through utility or happiness, which also makes them vulnerable to disappointment and conflict. If you’ve ever felt you were no longer "useful" to a friend, this dynamic may sound familiar.
Then, there’s the third type: the good friendship, built on a more stable foundation. In this type of relationship, the friendship itself is prioritized, even when utility or pleasure are no longer at play. Aristotle believed that good friendships are marked by the desire to lead a virtuous life—a life in which one develops their most humane and ethical qualities. According to him, a person can only fully develop in relation to others, and it’s within these good friendships that boundaries blur, and selfless love emerges. For Aristotle and other ancient philosophers, relationships were essential to individual happiness.
Fast-forward to today, and despite the vast differences in our societal structures, contemporary philosophers continue to point to friendship figures that resemble Aristotle’s categories.
In his book Friendship in a Time of Economics, American political philosopher Todd May identifies two contemporary versions of Aristotle’s pleasure and utility friendships: the consumer and the self-entrepreneur.
Consumer friendships are those we participate in for the pleasure they bring us, while entrepreneurial friendships are those we invest in, hoping for a return. May’s argument is that these relationships mirror the lives we are encouraged to lead by neoliberal discourses.
This leads us back to a common friendship clash: when relationships buckle under the pressure of economic discourse, and questions like “What is this worth? Am I having fun? What do I gain from this?” begin to dominate. When these are the primary concerns, friendships take on an economic character, which I believe isolates people more than it connects them.
However, as Foucault reminds us, “where there is power, there is resistance.” In this light, what Aristotle called the virtuous friendship, and what May refers to as the true friendship, can serve as a challenge to the tenor of our times.
This third type of friendship—the non-economic one—allows us to see ourselves from another’s perspective. It opens up new interests or deepens current ones, and perhaps most importantly, it supports us through difficult periods. Shared experience, rather than common amusement or advancement, is the foundation of deep friendships.
True friendships don’t rely on diversion or return but on meaning. They expose our vulnerabilities and add layers of significance to our lives that arise only through being friends with this specific person.
As Michel de Montaigne said about his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”
Given that friendships can act as motors of meaning and sources of support—even when we are neither fun nor useful—isn’t it odd that they aren’t more widely studied within psychology and the social sciences?
The Friendless Therapeutic Set-Up
It’s generally understood that unless a problem explicitly manifests in a relationship, therapy is something we do alone. You don’t bring a friend to therapy!
Therapeutic settings across modalities typically involve the client entering a secluded space to “look inward.” Whether it’s cognitive-behavioral or psychoanalytic therapy, the framework remains the same: a therapist with expert knowledge and a client seeking help with a problem. The two sit across from each other, often with a table between them. On that table, you’ll likely find a pack of Kleenex.
The issue is that once the session ends, the client leaves behind the “togetherness” established with the therapist. Whether the insights gained are successfully integrated into the client’s daily life is left largely to the client’s own efforts.
But what if therapists prioritized counteracting the Western ideal of individual responsibility and self-improvement? What if they moved away from the notion that it’s solely up to the individual to make the most of therapy? Is this even possible?
Definitional Ceremonies
In my search for alternative therapeutic frameworks with a greater focus on the social construction of identity and problems, I came across the concept of “definitional ceremonies” or “outsider witnessing practices,” popularized by Australian social worker and psychotherapist Michael White.
White would often invite witnesses—sometimes former clients—into the therapy room to help clients reclaim or redefine their identities. Witnesses would share what resonated with them during the session, helping to “thicken” the client’s preferred narratives by giving them a more social character.
This type of social “identity work,” first described by anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff in 1976, involved elders in Venice, California, who gathered to witness and retell each other’s life stories. This process, known as definitional ceremonies, empowered them to reclaim visibility in a society that rendered them invisible.
In narrative therapy, outsider witnesses play a crucial role in affirming clients’ stories on their own terms, helping clients feel empowered to shape their own identities. This practice counters the isolation that can occur in traditional therapeutic setups.
Between Friendship and Witnessing
Friendships hold untapped potential for witnessing and support, yet they are rarely incorporated into therapeutic settings. This is a missed opportunity. Therapy that doesn’t acknowledge the client’s relationships and daily life risks undermining the significant role external factors play in therapeutic outcomes.
And if the therapeutic work feels too abstracted from the client’s daily life, the client risks feeling isolated and alone in the process going on in between sessions, and might not even get anything out of therapy.
Incorporating a friend as a witness in therapy could serve as a bridge between the therapy room and the client’s daily life, helping to ensure that the insights gained are supported and integrated into everyday experience.
I’ve created a simple model to illustrate the relationship between therapy and the client’s daily life, and how witnessing and friendship interact within this framework. In the model, I represent the separation between therapy and the client’s daily life with two vertical lines, while the impact of therapy on daily life, and vice versa, is visualized with arrows pointing in opposite directions.
What I aim to conceptualize with this model is what might happen if a client had the option to bring a good friend to affirm them in their identity work. As a witness, the friend could serve as a supportive link between the therapy room and the client’s broader life, helping to ensure that the insights gained during the session are integrated into the client’s everyday experiences.
So, imagine the therapeutic set-up with an extra chair. Today, the client has brought a friend—not because the friendship is the problem, but because it could be part of the solution.