Abstract
“Chaos prevails,” declared Colby when prefacing his review of psychotherapy in the mid-1960s (Colby, 1964). By then, even many Freudians were questioning the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. And chaos still prevails, since by now the number of psychotherapies seems roughly to equal the number of its practitioners. For a cognitive therapist, however, the apparent chaos may simply mean that different techniques change the faulty cognitions that produce psychological disorders. This violates, of course, our expectation that there should be one best way to do anything—treat a medical disorder, learn how to read, or build a home. The single best solution stereotype is valid, if at all, only for limited and highly specified activities. Particularly in the psychological realm there are usually many different ways of solving problems. If psychotherapy is the modification or elimination of faulty conceptions, there is little reason for surprise that different treatment procedures produce similar results. There is even research support for the latter contention, as Smith and Glass (1977) have shown.
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© 1985 Plenum Press, New York
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Raimy, V. (1985). Misconceptions and the Cognitive Therapies. In: Mahoney, M.J., Freeman, A. (eds) Cognition and Psychotherapy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-7562-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-7562-3_7
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