Treatment of Disorders and Difficulties

The fi eld of psychotherapy and counseling is continuously evolving. Approaches to treatment change in the wake of the addition of new information, opportunities to test the impact of treatments over time, and the zeitgeist of the place and time where psychotherapy/ counseling is practiced. The time has long passed when one method, psychoanalytic psychotherapy as described by Freud (Freud, 1966 ), dominated the scene. Even during Freud’s era, Jung ( 1935 ), Adler (Adler, Glueck, & Lind, 2006 ), and several other analysts offered competing visions of the core aspects of personality and psychopathology and the conduct of treatment. There has been an explosion in the number of psychotherapies over the past few decades with that number now reaching more than 1,000 different named therapies (Garfi eld, 2006 ). Moreover, although some of these treatments are only slight variations of others, many approaches have their foundations in an array of diverse philosophies concerned with the understanding of personality, ethical questions (e.g., how to live life well), and notions of how to most helpfully improve problems in living and psychopathology.