The responsibility of a friend would be to encourage individuation, self-reliance, and imagination. Such friendship might be informed by notions such as Martin Buber's "I-Thou" relationship and the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel's ideal of "availability" for another. Its practice may draw on the experience of psychotherapy, in which a "free and protective space" allows an encounter that is simultaneously trusting, opening, and healing. For learning and training, it may take as its model the relationship of artist and apprentice, in which skills are developed so that creativity can be realized with technical competence and expertise.
— Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs