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Outlook

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The Process of Psychotherapy

Abstract

In this outlook chapter we discuss what was accomplished by the Fokker–Planck modeling of psychotherapy processes, and suggest directions for future research. We emphasize that psychotherapy research should focus on the dynamics, preferably using time series with high resolution which delivers insight into the dynamics even within the range of a few seconds, the “nowness” of embodied consciousness. A further prominent issue is therapeutic coupling and entrainment using measures of synchrony, where there is need to further standardize the various computational approaches. We claim that therapeutic intervention may be achieved by the “Archimedean role” of the therapist, who obtains leverage through his or her personality. These are implications and conclusions based on the minimal models developed in previous chapters. When focusing on the affordances of the therapeutic setting, we arrive at a new interpretation of the contextual model: contextual-deterministic interventions utilize especially the motivational common factors, such as resource activation or cognitive dissonance, in order to modify the attractor landscape of a client.

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Tschacher, W., Haken, H. (2019). Outlook. In: The Process of Psychotherapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12748-0_10

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