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Psychotherapy and Philosophy
- Duquesne University Press
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1 Psychotherapy and Philosophy 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 is largely overlooked. Yet these philosophical assumptions often determine not only the objectives of psychotherapy , but also the actual framework in which it is practiced. We have written this book in an attempt to move beyond the narrow technical concerns of much current psychotherapy. Our aim is to elaborate psychotherapy from a human science perspective in order to help professionals, students, and interested readers appreciate the importance of theory for clinical endeavors and thus to enlarge the scope of psychotherapy training and practice. Psychotherapy cannot be studied in a strictly empirical manner without also considering the history of philosophy, the challenges of ethics, and the vagaries of politics. Our journey will take us on an exploration of an intellectual tradition that freely combines insights from philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychologists. The interplay between philosophy and psychotherapy, and its long history in Western thought, is especially relevant to our undertaking. The juxtaposition of philosophy and psychotherapy may seem unusual to those who are unaccustomed to making this connection . In fact, we will demonstrate that philosophers have much to teach 2 Psychotherapy as a Human Science therapists. In our view, philosophy is inherent to the very practice of psychotherapy. For many psychotherapists, the greatest impediment to the introduction of philosophy into clinical discourse is the issue of how data are accumulated, interpreted, and assessed. Many clinicians have a stereotyped conception of the philosopher as an isolated scholar who reflects only on his or her own experience in a process of introspection . This view overlooks precisely what postmodernism has taught us: the generation of ideas is always dependent upon difference and otherness . Only by engaging with what is other than ourselves is it possible to open up new ways of thinking. And, as we shall see, many of the philosophers considered in this book are directly concerned with the practical application of their ideas, whether through teaching and research or the actual practice of psychology. WHAT IS A HUMAN SCIENCE? A dialogue with philosophy is not merely useful, but also vitally necessary for the grounding of theory, practice, and research in psychotherapy from a human science perspective. But what is a “human science perspective”? Prior to 1874, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, psychology was traditionally linked with philosophy and focused not only on human behavior, but also on the nature of the mind or soul. Psychologists who broke with that tradition and embraced experimentalism and the natural science approach were often German or German-speaking and sought to distinguish their orientation from that of their predecessors and counterparts in philosophy and the humanities. So in the German language a distinction is often made between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften ) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). In the broadest sense, “natural” science seeks to study and elucidate the behavior of entities and processes that exist in nature. These are generally void of intention; that is to say, they are not endowed with experience or intentionality. Conversely, human behavior is almost always a function of an individual’s experience of and intentions toward the world — a world that is constituted by and for the individual in [3.238.195.81] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:17 GMT) terms of culturally and historically embedded meanings and symbols, as well as his or her own idiosyncratic choices and decisions. Unfortunately, since the rise of experimental psychology more than a century ago, many branches of psychology and psychiatry methodically seek to bracket or nullify any careful consideration of human subjectivity and intentions — the very things that render human behavior intelligible in ordinary circumstances. Under the pretext that human behavior can be explained or interpreted without reference to the subject ’s experience and intentions, psychology, and psychiatry tend to reify or “objectify” the individual (Laing 1960). For most of the twentieth century, academic psychology sought to elucidate the structures, processes, and functional interrelationships that suffused the mind and mental faculties or functions like intelligence, perception, memory, language acquisition, and the like. In order to achieve this objective, it generated empirical generalizations regarding the behavior of the organism...