Integration among psychotherapies and the future of psychotherapy

As society as a whole and the scientific world have begun to expect that the validity of psychotherapy be verified, a scientific and integrated approach to psychotherapy is the only possible answer. The development of operational definitions and the use of scientific designs represent the most effective way to generate empirical data and the only way to integrate psychotherapy objectively into general psychology.     

Chinese indigenous psychotherapies in Singapore

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevance of folk therapies or traditional medicine to counselling in Singapore. It addresses the meanings of the indigenous psychotherapies and then the rationales for understanding them. Three popular Chinese indigenous psychotherapies have been selected for discussion in terms of their aetiology and treatment beliefs about emotional problems: traditional Chinese medicine, dang‐ki (Chinese shamanism), and feng‐shui (Chinese geomancy). Findings from an empirical study are briefly presented to show that Chinese Singaporean clients hold eclectic belief systems encompassing both beliefs derived from thse indigenous psychotherapies and those from Western psychotherapies (e.g. psychodynamic and behavioural therapies). Two cases are presented to illustrate the application of these indigenous psychotherapies in counselling practice.     

Towards trans-cultural histories of psychotherapies

Abstract

Psychotherapy is a regulated form of verbal interaction, which necessarily incorporates broader shared cultural assumptions and narrative templates. Like any form of verbal interaction, it is fluid, adaptable and malleable, particularly when it enters new cultural domains. The increasing global penetration of psychotherapeutic techniques calls for an analysis of the changes, modifications, and innovations of its techniques and accompanying theories. This will eventually allow scholars to view European and North American forms of psychotherapy as variations tied to specific locations and cultures. Tracing the trans-national and trans-cultural dissemination of psychotherapeutic theories and techniques allows historians to chart their inherent variability, test limits, and analyse the broader social and political uses of psychotherapy within different national and cultural contexts. In addition to investigating psychotherapy in its various manifestations, historians should continue to inquire about its personal, social and political uses.     

Psychoanalysis and the political process

The Political Process is Society's mechanism for debating value systems. The term can also be used to describe a debate in a variety of other settings — subsystems of Society — about value systems. This paper is about the contributions that psychoanalysis, both as a theory and in its various applications, can make to the understanding of the process of debate and its setting. It is also about the implications for our conduct that arise from this understanding.     

Psychoanalysis and academia: Psychoanalysis at the crossroads between exact and human sciences

Abstract

It is proposed that the mental health crisis in “developed” societies is largely due to the fact that psychology is heavily based upon an exact science model academically, and upon a medical model clinically. Indeed, these models favor an apperception of mental pathologies as essential entities with a biological etiology, and this reification facilitates a process of nonimplication of the sufferer as concerns his condition. The progress in brain sciences holds the promise of acknowledging psychology as an autonomous discipline, properly describing mental logics, which are constrained, but not determined, by brain characteristics; moreover, mental logical operations mandatorily need content from the contingent history of the subject's life to become instantiated. Psychology, then, is at the interface between an exact science and a human science epistemology. Consequently, we need psychologists and clinicians in the field of mental health who can apply a particularized approach to mental distress, who can deal with the personal feeling of nonmastery, who can base their clinical thinking on the patient's story, and who thereby systematically stay away from any essentializing temptation, while simultaneously being aware that the theoretical framework they operate from is embedded in a continuous scientific dialogue. Psychoanalysis is at that crossroads.