The following are excerpts from a keynote address given by Mary Pipher to a group of therapists. It was published in the January/February 2007 Psychotherapy Networker.

..."The job of... therapists... is to humanize and de-objectify - to teach empathy and point of view. As Gloria Steinem said, "Empathy is the most radical of human emotions."

Therapists... foster the growth of moral imagination in other human beings...

Our work requires stamina and persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Writing a nonfiction book is a little like building a barn with matches. Helping a couple who've been feuding for 20 years to resolve their differences and improve their relationship can feel that way too.

...It requires that we confront failure. We constantly reach the edge of our capacities for creativity and connection. We often don't know the effects of our actions. If we succeed at something, we often don't know why. We grow by learning to "fail better," in the words of Samuel Beckett."

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..."therapists are storytellers, constantly crafting stories of hope. We deftly handle complexity and ambiguity, illuminate nuances, deal with resistance, follow tangents, and build resplendent metaphors. We continually break mindsets, fight habituation, and try to keep our perceptions fresh and clear. In addition, we must be open to magic, something writers call many names - the muses, cruise control, automatic writing, and serendipity. ...[therapists] deal in epiphanies, which we can't schedule, but we can facilitate."

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"With therapists, it's a question of building a relationship grounded in respect, steadfastness, and common sense. We therapists hope we've been useful. We want the dad to stop hitting the mom, the teenager to overcome her eating disorder, and the teacher to stop drinking. But with both writing and therapy, if we care so much that we lose sight of what's happening moment-by-moment, we'll fail.

...therapists are coaches for authenticity, teachers of empathy, inspirers of curiosity and good works, and proselytizers for openness, kindness, and clarity. We have the best work in the world: we help people do what my grandmother said was everyone's life work - to make good use of their time and their talents.

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We're dreamcatchers, seizers of the teachable moment. These moments involve accepting an invitation to engage with the world in all its glory and wretchedness - the portals into understanding the beautiful universe as it really is, not as we've been programmed to see it.

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Mary Pipher, Ph.D., is the author of the 1994 bestseller Reviving Ophelia. A psychologist with an anthropologist's eye for the fault lines between psychology and culture in America, she's written other bestselling books that reflect this sensibility, including The Shelter of Each Other and Another Country. Her most recent book is Writing to Change the World.