Abstract
According to the authors, there are two distinct sets of underlying philosophical presumptions of psychotherapy science today: mainstream, well-established assumptions drawing on empirism, determinism, reductionism and mechanism and relatively new, alternative ones, here traced back to the concepts of intentionality, wholeness and analogical thinking. The current state of affairs in this field is a result of historical developments in Western science. In the antiquity and Middle Ages, truth was based on confirmation by authority rather than empirical experience. Only from renaissance onwards, experiment became the primary tool. In the modern era, the objective truth was thus to be found through verifiable, repeatable observations by several individuals and repeated, repeatable and standardised measurements of phenomena. An understanding had arisen from experiments that there were simple rules behind all phenomena that could not be observed directly and that these laws were abstractions requiring ideal conditions. Therefore, it was necessary to disregard some conditions/factors deemed disruptive in experiments, regardless of their role under normal circumstances. This reductionist simplification made it possible to obtain generally applicable data. Physics (especially Newton’s rules of motion) played a major role in the development of this perspective and had had major methodological impact all other sciences.
Highlights
There are two distinct sets of underlying philosophical presumptions of psychotherapy science today: mainstream, well-established assumptions drawing on empirism, determinism, reductionism and mechanism and relatively new, alternative ones, here traced back to the concepts of intentionality, wholeness and analogical thinking
Scientific methods, depending heavily on empiricism, reductionism and determinism, were applied with considerable success in hard sciences, spread to other fields and came to dominate them. Another driving principle that emerged was mechanism, meaning, in a philosophical sense, the attribution of ‘natural processes and phenomena of the living to the laws of motion’ and explaining them strictly deterministically according to the principle of cause and effect in the sense of causa efficiens (Rieken and Gelo 2015)
Modern physics has since stridden forward, as the perspective of the simple causal-analytical worldview of mechanics was challenged and relativized
Summary
There are two distinct sets of underlying philosophical presumptions of psychotherapy science today: mainstream, well-established assumptions drawing on empirism, determinism, reductionism and mechanism and relatively new, alternative ones, here traced back to the concepts of intentionality, wholeness and analogical thinking. The mechanistic influence with its prescribed quantitative methods is still prevalent in psychotherapy research, dominated by big samples allowing for context free generalizations of results, data collection through standardized measurements (questionnaires, rating scales), with focus on statistics, while subjective experience of the patient is pushed aside in favours of reliable measurements of what is supposed to change.
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