CONCEPT
The Too-Competent Therapist
May's warning that resolving the patient's uncertainty too quickly steals the encounter—now AI's characteristic failure mode.
The too-competent therapist, in Rollo May's clinical observation, is the practitioner who resolves the patient's uncertainty before the patient has had the chance to sit with it, to feel its contours, to discover what it was actually about. The patient brings confusion; the therapist provides clarity. The patient feels better. But the patient has not grown, because growth occurs in the encounter with uncertainty, not in its resolution. The resolution is the result of growth, not the mechanism. The too-competent therapist has stolen the patient's encounter and replaced it with the therapist's competence—a theft disguised as help. Claude is, in May's framework, the most competent collaborator any builder has ever had. It resolves uncertainty with extraordinary speed and reliability. And the risk is that the resolution comes too soon—that the builder's uncertainty about how to proceed, which could have been the occasion for genuine creative encounter, is resolved before the builder experiences it as the productive discomfort that signals authentic territory. The rightness of the answer preempts the encounter with the question.
