Quote:
Originally Posted by Fool Zero
I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be an impossible task. Measuring anything about the process would mean focusing on the observable behavior of the participants but as far as I can tell, what makes the difference between good and bad therapy is their experience of what's going on.
50 years ago Carl Rogers wrote in some detail about his "process conception of psychotherapy" (Chapter 7 of On Becoming a Person -- excerpt here). I happen to think he put his finger on, or very near to, how therapy works (when it works). Unfortunately for any attempt to measure how it works, though, it seems to work not because of what we can measure but in spite of it.
I once had friends who used to bat around "imponderable" questions such as, "Is the perfect imitation of love the same as love, or not?" At the time, I didn't have an answer but now I'd say: clearly not! In one case you have the experience of loving; in the other case, of imitating. If the person who's the object of your attention isn't able to tell the difference (at first, anyway), that still doesn't change anything.
If you should someday want to quantify the seven stages of therapy that Rogers describes -- how would you go about it?  |
And this is assuming that Rogers' conceptualization of the therapeutic process is the most valuable theory and the one that we would spend time attempting to quantify... while a majority of major research psychologists these days are more behavioral and scoff at Rogerian methods... My idea is that therapy
should rely on a set of at least somewhat observable processes.
This is why. Therapy can be somewhat of an art. But we need to make it a science and something we can rely on because
people's lives are at stake. I know it's nice to think of it as an art, and that making
people's psyches into a
science is nebulous and tricky and cannot possibly consider every minute detail because it is so vast and people are infinitely complex.. but we need to somehow make sure it works. Somehow we need to make therapy something we can truly depend on. So we need it to be a science. Somehow. So we may not be able to take into consideration every minute variable that may influence treatment. But we may be able to conceptualize some kind of formula which seems to explain the majority of successful treatment cases so that we can quantify the major mechanisms of change in therapy. Obviously there are going to be things we miss. But if we are mostly on target then it will improve the practice of therapy.
Now, some people are naturally good therapists. They just have a knack for it. They have high verbal ability and processing power and an ear for the truth and a sense for people. But this is not everyone who practices in mental health. But they are still out there practicing. We need this algorithm for
those therapists. The ones who don't naturally have a knack for it but took the classes and did the work and have licenses. Making therapy a quantifiable, observable process (at least loosely, at least mostly) saves people from these kinds of therapists who may not be "naturals."
But I haven't even begun to get my brain around this, truly... I need to read and think.