1. in a therapeutic setting, a therapist’s openness to a client’s personal experience, or a client’s openness to his or her own personal experience. 2. a behavior set in which a person expects and prepares to receive a message. Italian-born U.S. psychiatrist Silvano Arieti (1914–1982) claimed that a person with schizophrenia who is habitually prepared to experience a hallucination may learn to avoid it when made aware of this attitude.