Social Clinical Psychology

Abstract

As we noted in Chapter 1, the profession of clinical psychology in its early stages developed outside mainstream experimental psychology in general and social cognitive psychology in particular. In its first generation, psychology split into a decontextualized science of laboratory curiosities and an unscientific practice. Some contend that even today we have not made much progress in generating a scientific foundation for clinical practice and that what scientific foundation we have is not known or used by most practitioners (e.g.,Dawes, 1994). In contrast, medicine successfully instituted a scientific practitioner model (Starr, 1982). Psychology’s scientist-practitioner model was a political compromise (Raimy, 1950) in the absence of a linking science. In this chapter, we attempt to build a foundation for a contemporary social cognitive approach to understanding behavior, personality, and adjustment. This perspective draws from both social cognitive psychology and clinical psychology and thus is neither a social cognitive nor a clinical theory. Instead, it is an approach to understanding human behavior that is applicable to both normal (adaptive) and abnormal (maladaptive) behavior. In fact, such distinctions are essentially arbitrary in the social cognitive perspective, as discussed later. This approach is most accurately called “a social cognitive approach to understanding human adjustment, to problems in adjustment, and to interventions to enhance adjustment.” We will reduce this cumbersome phrase to social clinical psychology for convenience. The reader should keep in mind, however, that social implies social cognitive and that clinical implies the study of psychological adaptation and adjustment defined broadly. It is not limited to the traditional clinical notion of the absence of mental disorder or dysfunction, nor to traditional clinical disorders as embodied in current psychiatric diagnostic schemes. Indeed, the field of clinical psychology has become increasingly difficult to define over the past two decades as we have learned more about the generality of psychological change processes, the relationship between normal development and maladaptation, and the biological basis of behavioral and emotional problems.