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Psychotherapy Research Needs Theory. Outline for an Epistemology of the Clinical Exchange

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Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of a basic assumption grounding the clinical research: the ontological autonomy of psychotherapy—based on the idea that the clinical exchange is sufficiently distinguished from other social objects (i.e. exchange between teacher and pupils, or between buyer and seller, or interaction during dinner, and so forth). A criticism of such an assumption is discussed together with the proposal of a different epistemological interpretation, based on the distinction between communicative dynamics and the process of psychotherapy—psychotherapy is a goal-oriented process based on the general dynamics of human communication. Theoretical and methodological implications are drawn from such a view: It allows further sources of knowledge to be integrated within clinical research (i.e. those coming from other domains of analysis of human communication); it also enables a more abstract definition of the psychotherapy process to be developed, leading to innovative views of classical critical issues, like the specific-nonspecific debate. The final part of the paper is devoted to presenting a model of human communication—the Semiotic Dialogical Dialectic Theory–which is meant as the framework for the analysis of psychotherapy.

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Notes

  1. Here and henceforth I use the term “instantiation” for referring to the nexus between the phenomenon and the basic dynamics/general object underpinning it. Saying that X is an instantiation of Y, I want to mean that X is an instance, an example, a specific object of the general class Y. My use of the term is consistent with philosophical language—the “principle of instantiation” states that any property exists only if it is instantiated in a specific object (needless to say the consistency in the use of the term does not mean to agree with such a philosophical thesis). I adopt the term “instantiation” for the sake of avoiding a dualistic view of the nexus between dynamics and phenomenon, entailing in the use of terms as “cause” and “effect”—namely the dynamics as something that causes the phenomenon as its own effect. Thus, the use of the term “instantiation” is motivated by the assumption that there is just one world that one can see in accordance to different epistemic frames and levels of abstraction—at a very abstract level one sees it as a dynamic, while at a less abstract, more local level one sees it as a specific phenomenical experience. Consider the nexus between the English language and this text. The latter is not the effect of the former. Rather, it is its instantiation, namely an exemplar, a concrete object that keeps inherently in itself the properties of the English language. The text and the English are not two different things—rather, the latter is the form of the former as well as the former is the “place” where the latter comes to existence.

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  1. Department of Educational, Psychological and Teaching Science, Via Stampacchia, 45, 73100, Lecce, Italy

    Sergio Salvatore

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Salvatore, S. Psychotherapy Research Needs Theory. Outline for an Epistemology of the Clinical Exchange. Integr. psych. behav. 45, 366–388 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-011-9180-9

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