The Mandate

Anyone who entrusts the Psychological Private Office with a mandate acquires not a quota of conversation hours, but a place within limited resources. This place ensures that a conversation can take place when it is needed, within a structured framework that is in place before the first word is spoken. What constitutes this place, and what it rests on, is set out in the sections that follow.

Personal concerns do not follow a timetable. They take shape gradually, intensify or emerge without warning, and the moment at which they can be grasped most clearly seldom falls where a diary leaves room. A mandate takes account of this: conversations require no appointment, but come about promptly over a protected connection and last as long as the matter requires. A concern can thus be raised before it has become pressing, and it is often passing thoughts that turn out to be the real starting point.

Such availability has to be more than a promise: it requires resources reserved for the mandate. That is only possible as long as the number of mandates remains in low single figures. Time that remains available is not left over; it is set aside.

It is this very small number of parallel mandates that makes possible a way of working in which the content of conversations never becomes a file. Where what is said does not leave the room of the conversation, people can speak more openly, and the more fully the cards are on the table, the more precisely things can be appraised. What was never recorded is beyond any later access: it cannot be handed over under pressure or pass to heirs, nor can it be read against a background that no one had foreseen at the time of the conversation.

Loyalty cannot be divided. For this reason, the Psychological Private Office does not accept any mandate that touches on a matter already raised in an existing or concluded mandate. The small number of mandates thus rests not only on organisational but also on substantive grounds.

Review from Within

With an ongoing mandate, it should be reviewed regularly whether its continuation is justified. This is usually done from outside, on the basis of results and progress; that, however, necessarily requires insight into the content. In the Psychological Private Office, such insight is deliberately excluded, since the conversation takes place in a consequence-free space; the review can therefore only be carried out from within, by the client.

That seems simple, since one usually senses whether a conversation is helping. Such an assessment rests on firmer ground, however, when the client can see how the appraisals came about and what they are based on. This is one of the reasons why the conversations are deliberately and consistently conducted in plain language, with the aim of enabling the client to follow every appraisal and trace it back to its grounds. Transparency and equal footing permit a review on an informed basis.

Clarity and traceability are thus also a touchstone: where they fail to emerge, that is a clear indication that the mandate, in its present form, does not hold.

Anyone who grants a mandate has the Psychological Private Office at their disposal as a lasting resource: promptly accessible, with undivided loyalty and without any record of content.

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