🚀 go-pugleaf

There's been so much to respond to in this thread(s) that it's hard to
know where to begin...

I'd like to start by proposing a somewhat radical notion: that the role of
experimental clinical psychology is to provide a critique of clinical
practice, and that clinical practice, properly understood and carried out
(as it too rarely is) is a research activity.  On one level, it is (or
should be) a scientific inquiry into the distress experienced by one
individual or family, making use of theoretical constructs and empirical
data drawn from similar (though never identical) cases, and the
identification of effective methods of alleviating the client's complaint.
The cookbook approach to diagnosis and treatment fostered by managed care
and some advocates of "empirically verified treatment" is not terribly
compatible with this.

On a higher conceptual level, clinical practice is where the basic data of
clinical psychology are gathered and theoretical conceptualizations
formulated.  It is analogous to field research in anthropology, ecology,
geology, meteorology, and a host of other sciences in which the complexity
of the basic problems is such that they can never be fully replicated in a
controlled experiment. Unfortunately, some psychologists (clinicians as
well as researchers) seem intent on following a model drawn from the
relationship between chenistry or physics and engineering, in which
techniques are invented in the lab and then applied in a purely technical
manner to real world problems (never mind that it doesn't really work like
that, even in those fields--at least not all the time).

In the model I'm proposing, the relationship between psychotherapy and
experimental psychology is a circular one, in which data and
conceptualizations developed in the field are refined and tested in the
lab, and the results fed back into the clinical process where they are
tested for ecological validity and contribute to the formation of new
clinical theories, and so on. The breakdown of this circularity has led to
increasing distance and even hostility between clinicians and
experimentalists.  The lab types complain that clinicians don't do what
they're told; the therapists that the research coming from the labs is
rarely applicable to actual clinical situations.  There is no
institutional setup for gathering clinical data, which experimentalists
regard as merely anecdotal anyway, and clinicians, having been trained to
think of themselves as "applied scientists" rarely approach the clinical
problem in a truly investigative, rather than a purely technical manner.
Clinicans need theory in order to organize the complexity of the phenomena
they encounter in practice; experimentalists seem to have such a profound
distrust of theory that they resist any effort to organize the data
they've worked so hard to generate.

I'd like to think it doesn't have to be that way...

Regards,

Tim

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Tim Connor, M.S.                                        "Psychotherapy is not
Pacific University                                      an applied science, it
School of Professional Psychology                       is a basic science in
2004 Pacific Avenue                                     which the scientists
Forest Grove, OR 97116   USA                            are the client and his
<connort@pacificu.edu>                                  therapist"
                                                                --George Kelly
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