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Welcome to Psychotherapedia

Psychotherapedia is a forum where leading researchers, scholars, theorists, and clinicians who are devoted to advancing the field of clinical science and psychotherapeutics can contribute methods and techniques of contemporary psychotherapy.

Introduction:

Psychotherapy researchers, theorists, and clinicians have been delineating some of the complex interrelationships among many factors at work in the quest for increasing the effectiveness of psychotherapy. It has been well established in the empirical literature that relational factors (Norcorss, 2002) play an important role in determining treatment outcome. The quality of the therapeutic alliance, patient factors, and therapist characteristics all affect the overall potency of the treatment process and outcome. Most clinical scientist believe that psychotherapy also includes the theoretical maps which we use to orient and guide the treatment as well as to serve as tools for researchers. We are also beginning to discern from the accumulating evidence base principles that optimize change (Castonguay & Beutler, 2006). In addition to the relational factors, and emergent principles, methods and techniques of psychotherapy represent the technologies which are embedded into relational processes and utilized as tools which psychotherapist incorporate into the psychotherapeutic process. We are embarking on a new journey as the field of psychotherapy matures toward a unified clinical science (Magnavita, 2006). It appears that we are leaving the era of integration and entering a new phase of unification whereby the underlying principles and processes that operate in all approaches to psychotherapy are being more clearly articulated (Magnavita, 2008). Considerable progress has been and continues to be made in mapping the important elements of contemporary psychotherapeutic (See Figure 1.1). Theory is the foundation upon which contemporary psychotherapeutics rests. The principles emerge out of the combination of the patient-therapist factors as they are applied in the technical process of utilizing methods and techniques, which are the central domain.