Hi TOK Folks,

 

  First, thanks to Jeffery Smith and Mike Mascolo, TOK Society members, for their joining me in a webinar yesterday we put on for the Society for the Exploration in Psychotherapy Integration (we were also joined by Marv Goldfried). I will share the link to the webinar when it comes available. It was pretty well attended, with almost 100 folks there.

 

Mike’s Creating Common Ground was a great frame for the dialogue. I saw that there was significant agreement among the panelist on the idea of common principles, on the idea of transcending (or not being encased in) the specific paradigms, on the idea that psychotherapy is a developmental change process that focuses on entrenched maladaptive patterns, and that a central and basic mechanism of change involves corrective emotional experiences, which are now well-grounded in basic learning and neuroscience research paradigms. Along the latter point, I also saw that we agreed there was an important bridge that should be made between basic psychological research and psychotherapy.

 

I sensed that if we kept going there might then have been some significant disagreement. As Marv and I (at least), clearly have different attitudes about theory, at least in some respect. But it would have been interesting to see. I am hopeful we will continue to explore this line. My argument is that “yes” basic psychological research is key. However, unfortunately, basic psychology is a mess, conceptually. The bridge between research and practice in the therapy room requires some coherent and systematic schemas for understanding, but basic psychological science fails us here. I also highlighted that psychological science fails at the level of “optimal human functioning”. Philosophy is necessary here, because the question of optimal functioning is not just a scientific question, but is very much a question of values and ethics and ideas about the lives we ought to live. This requires us to bridge into the humanistic and wisdom traditions.

 

Last, the brief, “Combined, Integrated, Unified” 10-minute overview I gave during the panel was based on this talk I recently at the end of March. It includes a review of what I call “the problem of psychology,” which, IMO, sets the stage for arguing why basic psychological science, in its current form, is not up to the task of grounding the practice of psychotherapy:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBqQxyXSFVI

 

Combined, integrated, unified: Toward a more coherent clinical psychology in the 21^st century was a talk was given in March 2021 and served as the keynote address to for the 31^st Annual meeting of the New Zealand Clinical Psychology Association. It reviews how a “combined-integrated” doctoral training program in the US has been developed that effectively weaves together a scientific humanistic framework that: (a) “combines” across the practice areas of clinical, counseling, and child-family-school psychology; (b) “integrates” across the different levels of analysis (physical, biological, psychological, and social) and the major intervention paradigms (humanistic, psychodynamic, CBT and systems); and (c) is grounded in a broad “unified” definition of psychology that clearly defines the science in relationship to and as separate from the practice.  

 

Warm regards,

Gregg

___________________________________________

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)

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