The field of psychotherapy has recently seen many technical advances. Yet it remains fragmented on a theoretical level and its philosophical foundations tend to be overlooked. Today, most of psychotherapy is founded on a natural science paradigm or alternatively, on social constructionism. In this chapter, I have critiqued these dominant paradigms and proposed instead a hermeneutic phenomenolog...

In his 1957 Annual Review of Psychology article, Winder defines psychotherapy as an interpersonal relationship characterized by the following attributes (p. 309): (1) at least one of the participants (i.e., therapist) is an expert in human relationships; (2) at least one of the participants (i.e., client) displays intrapersonal or interpersonal adjustment problems; (3) the objective of the rela...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether maintenance antidepressant pharmacotherapy and interpersonal psychotherapy sustain gains in health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) achieved during short-term treatment in older patients with depression. DESIGN After open combined treatment with paroxetine and interpersonal psychotherapy, responders were randomly assigned to a two (paroxetine vs placebo) by two...

While double-blinding is a crucial aspect of study design in an interventional clinical trial of medication for a disorder with subjective endpoints such as major depressive disorder, psychotherapy clinical trials, particularly cognitive-behavioral therapy trials, cannot be double-blinded. This paper highlights the evidence-based medicine problem of double-blinding in the outcome research of a ...