Research in Psychotherapy

Of all the disciplines that man has devised to alleviate human suffering, none is more complex and controversial than psychotherapy. Few will agree on what it is, on what training a psychotherapist should have, and whose approach is most effective. There are Freudians, Adlerians, Rogerians, Meyerians, Sullivanians, Jungians, Reichians, gestaltists, behaviorists, and existentialists along with a multiplicity of group and institutional modalities. There are detractors from psychotherapy who embrace the null hypothesis and proponents who swear by a most evasive and unproved success. As if to further confound an already impossible issue, two audacious psychologists, Julian Meltzoff and Melvin Kornreich write a book suggesting that controlled research be used to see if and how psychotherapy works. Defining their termsand advancing a very impressive argument for this proposal, they then offer a brief primer on research methodology and plunge into an informative review of more than 800 relevant controlled studies in