Clinical Social Psychology: A Birthright Reclaimed

Abstract

The content of social psychology provides the meta-basis of constructs for psychotherapy, because social psychology is the discipline centrally concerned with human interaction, and psychotherapy is a sophisticated form of human interaction with the purpose of solving client problems about other human interactions. Historically, clinical psychology inherited the right to do psychotherapy (within psychology) because of its early role in psychiatric diagnoses. Because of the association with medicine, the prevailing clinical orientation toward psycho-pathology and treatment tends to neglect the social interactional context of disturbed behavior Social psychology did not follow the possibilities developed by Lewin and has remained an experimental science of social variables as they affect individual behavior Nevertheless, clinical psychology has increasingly adopted the theoretical conceptions of social psychology in developing relation-oriented methods of psychotherapy As a discipline, social psychology is ...