Psychotherapy as a Human Science

Cover

Download PDF (6.9 MB)
 

Title Page, Copyright

Download PDF (82.4 KB)
pp. iii-iv

Contents

Download PDF (43.6 KB)
pp. v-vi

Preface

Download PDF (51.1 KB)
pp. vii-ix

This book is the culmination of many years of research, reflection, and spirited, scholarly communication about psychotherapy as a human science. We began this process with the aim of filling a gap in the current literature on psychotherapy. Much is written today about advances in neuroscience, empirically validated treatments, and quantitative methods for the practice...

Psychotherapy and Philosophy

Download PDF (110.7 KB)
pp. 1-23

Training in the mental health professions is increasingly driven by political and economic forces and has become very technical in focus. Insurance companies demand that psychotherapy be objectifiable, and as a result, manualized treatment protocols are now widespread. Because of this growing reliance on a natural science approach, the fact that psychotherapy rests on a set of implicit, philosophical assumptions about human experience...

Truth, Method, and the Limits of Reason: Descartes and Pascal

Download PDF (85.7 KB)
pp. 24-37

Ren� Descartes is commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy. He was born in La Haye, France, in the province of Tours in 1596, the youngest son of an eminent lawyer. He was a promising student and was sent to the Jesuit academy...

Reason, the Unconscious,and History: Kant, Hegel, and Marx

Download PDF (110.8 KB)
pp. 38-59

If Descartes ushered in the Age of Enlightenment, with its characteristic emphasis on reason, then Pascal, who dwelt on the mystery and power of the unconscious, prefigured the Romantic reaction against it. Wedged between the Enlightenment and Romantic movements was Immanuel Kant, who was born in 1724 in K�nigsberg, East Prussia, in what is now Kaliningrad, Russia. His parents...

Angst, Authenticity, and Ressentiment: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Download PDF (106.3 KB)
pp. 60-79

Much as they differed on important points, Hegel and Marx were both historicists who believed that history has an ascertainable goal and that movement toward this goal should be reckoned as “progress.” For Hegel that goal was the self-recovery of Absolute Spirit, while for Marx it was the creation of a classless society, free of exploitation and oppression. Disparate as these goals seem, both...

Psychology as a Human Science: Dilthey and Husserl

Download PDF (109.0 KB)
pp. 80-100

The year 1900 was a major turning point in the history of the human sciences: Nietzsche died, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and Wilhelm Dilthey published a paper entitled “The Rise of Hermeneutics.” Given the obscurity...

Psychology of the Unconscious: Freud and Jung

Download PDF (126.0 KB)
pp. 101-128

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in Freiburg, now Pribor, which is in the Czech Republic. His family moved to Vienna when he was six years old, and with the exception of studying in Paris in 1885, and a year before his death in 1939, when he fled to London to escape the Nazis, Freud lived in Vienna for his entire life. He was the eldest son (and favorite child) of his father’s second wife, and was raised...

Phenomenology and Human Experience: Scheler, Jaspers, and Heidegger

Download PDF (144.9 KB)
pp. 129-161

During his years at G�ttingen and Freiburg, Husserl trained or mentored many well-known philosophers, including Max Scheler, Eugene Fink, Alexander Pf�nder, Alfred Schutz, and Martin Heidegger. Sadly for him, as their work unfolded they developed in directions that differed from his original vision. While Husserl was disappointed with several of them, the one truly tragic story in this sad saga ...

Modes of Relatedness: Buber, Binswanger, and Boss

Download PDF (131.0 KB)
pp. 162-190

Martin Buber was born in Vienna in 1878 and was raised by his paternal grandparents. His grandfather Solomon, a wealthy philanthropist, was steeped in rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Bible, while his grandmother, Adele, was versed in Moses Mendelsohn, the German Enlightenment, and efforts to modernize European Jewry. So...

Recognition and the Limits of Reciprocity: Sartre, Lacan, and Laing

Download PDF (154.4 KB)
pp. 191-227

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. His father, a naval officer, died when he was a few months old, and he grew up in the home of his maternal grandfather, Carl Schweitzer, a professor of German at the Sorbonne. Carl Schweitzer was a native German speaker from the Alsace region who had shifted his personal loyalties to France....

Psychoanalysis and Intersubjectivity: Sullivan, Fromm, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, and Stolorow

Download PDF (131.7 KB)
pp. 228-257

Our travels thus far have brought us from the early seventeenth to the mid twentieth century, covering what is commonly known as the “modern era.” The themes, thinkers, and clinicians whose work we explored were all rooted in European soil. And with the exception of Freud, a neurologist by training, those who were not philosophers were invariably psychiatrists...

Psychotherapy and Postmodernism

Download PDF (118.4 KB)
pp. 258-283

Current debates in the mental health professions—including, but not limited to the psychotherapy field—are often couched in terms of the tensions between modernism and postmodernism. This polarization takes many forms, affecting how researchers and clinicians practice their crafts. In place of...

Clinical Postscript

Download PDF (86.6 KB)
pp. 284-298

Contemporary psychotherapy is often portrayed as an empirically based treatment technique practiced by professionals in a medical setting. According to this account, the patient has a discrete form of psychopathology, while the therapist is an expert with the requisite knowledge and skills to remove the patient’s symptoms as quickly and painlessly as possible. Yet the push toward “evidence-based” and standardized, highly scripted...

REFERENCES

Download PDF (102.3 KB)
pp. 299-318

INDEX

Download PDF (6.8 MB)
pp. 319-326