Science Direct
Practical Resources for the Mental Health Professional
2006, Pages 1-10
1 - The Art and Science of Psychotherapy
William O'Donohue
Janet Cummings
Publisher Summary
Psychotherapy is both an art and a science. Understanding the contribution of both these elements and achieving a proper balance in actual episodes of therapy is essential to optimize therapeutic success. As behavioral health professionals have often emphasized one aspect and neglected the other, this chapter aims to readdress this imbalance. A key task in therapy is creating and maintaining an optimal therapeutic relationship, which has to involve elements such as empathy, positive regard, and instilling hope. The relationship must also involve persistence in moving the client to explore areas they do not want to; giving honest, useful, but perhaps unwanted feedback; drawing clear boundaries (particularly with certain clients such as those with borderline personality disorder); and tough love, which necessitates the art of establishing and maintaining a therapeutic relationship. Another common mistake is to view psychotherapy as entirely an art. This view misses the point that there are causal relations in therapy that science is best at discovering. As all measurements contain error, knowing the scientific literature about the validity and limitations of the validity of psychological assessments is also essential knowledge in psychotherapy. Additionally, only testing can ensure that the intervention is safe. Finally, the advantage of scientific knowledge is that it has a large and known generalizability, which can be used to find out about what constitutes good therapy and teach others to implement this knowledge.
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