The Great Psychotherapy Debate
The contextual model. Common factors argued with the statistics attached.
The Great Psychotherapy Debate is one, if not the most, important book ever published about psychotherapy.
Wampold and Imel weigh two accounts of how psychotherapy works. The medical model holds that specific techniques, matched to specific disorders, carry the therapeutic effect. Against it they set the contextual model, in which outcome rests on the relationship, the alliance, the client's expectation of change, and the person of the therapist. The book marshals meta-analytic evidence for each claim: effect sizes for treatment differences, for alliance, for therapist variation, for allegiance in trials. The second edition, published in 2015, rebuilds the argument on a wider body of studies than the 2001 original.
For a psychodynamic clinician, the value is direct. The contextual model places relationship and the therapist above specific technique, and it does so with the quantitative apparatus that trial-based psychology respects. It gives a relational practitioner defensible ground in a literature dominated by manualised, disorder-specific trials, and a vocabulary for saying why the encounter itself does the work.
About the authors
Bruce Edward Wampold
Bruce E. Wampold is a counseling psychologist and emeritus professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also directs the research institute at Modum Bad Psychiatric Center in Norway. His research develops the contextual model of psychotherapy, an alternative to the medical model, and examines the common factors that account for therapeutic change across approaches. With Zac Imel he wrote The Great Psychotherapy Debate, which reviews the evidence on what makes psychotherapy effective.
Zac Imel
Zac E. Imel is a counseling psychologist on the faculty of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah, where he works in the counseling psychology program. His research studies psychotherapy process and outcome and applies computational methods to the analysis of therapy. He co-founded Lyssn, an artificial intelligence company that serves behavioral health and crisis response programs. With Bruce Wampold he co-wrote The Great Psychotherapy Debate, on the evidence behind effective psychotherapy.
Details
- 2001
- English
- Routledge
- Routledge, 2nd edition, 2015
- 334
- 9780805857092