The Efficiency of a Direction
With a direction, one’s counseling progresses. Even though random discharge of painful emotion should eventually and theoretically get rid of all the accumulated distress that people carry, the enormous amount of hurt experiences that they have lived through makes random progress a slow business in practice. It is much more profitable and efficient to discharge material with some direction rather than do it blindly. Thus, very early in one’s progress toward rationality, one begins spontaneously to set goals, to plan on definite achievements through counseling.
"Long-Range Goals” in The Human Situation
(Present Time 189, October 2017)