This is the second issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology that is devoted to reviewing what has been the development of the field in the 20th century and to project advantageous directions for the field in the 21st century. In the first millennial issue, we explored how the field first was developed from a merging of philosophical viewpoints and the political and social demands of the post-WWII era. The nature of the field has changed, but always it has held to some fundamental philosophical values that have been expressed in our training programs and in our clinical work. As we illustrated in that issue by the flurry of discordant opinions about the Rorschach, there always has been a tension between the values that we have placed on theories and philosophies and those that we have placed on scientific findings in our field. These tensions have not disappeared, and in many ways they have become stronger. However, they reflect less a disparate valuing of science and practice as they do a discordance about what constitutes sufficient proof of a theory, technique, or procedure. This disparity of views about knowledge becomes even clearer in the current issue.
In the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology, we inspect the philosophies that have surrounded major areas of practice in our field. Unlike the first millennial issue, in which our focus on philosophies were regarding broad-band issues, such as philosophies of clinical psychology, training, and projective assessment, this issue narrows our focus to three areas that have been central in the development of the profession.
First, we will look at the philosophical development of psychotherapy as a method of influence. We begin with the major schools that characterized our beginning in the mid-to-late 1940s and view how these schools have broadened, changed, and grown. Early in our history, psychoanalytic therapy and client-centered therapy were the primary contenders for followers, but they took very different roads to discovery. Cognitive therapy was just emerging, largely in the form of Rational Emotive Therapy, and psychotherapy research was still a hope to be realized. There frequently were contentious differences among those advocating for these different positions, and by juxtaposing views of the time with contemporary developments, we can see clearly that the changes that ensued reflected the tensions among opinions about what constitutes knowledge and how we best might obtain it. Progress has been made by and through controversypitting viewpoints against one another.