This article by Martin Goldfried has been published on the psychotherapy.net website. It begins:
“The field of psychotherapy has been around for quite a while—well over 100 years. According to sociologists of science, a field only reaches ‘maturity’ when there exists a consensus amongst those working in the field. Within psychotherapy, we have yet to reach that stage. Instead, psychotherapy is characterized by someone coming up with still another new form of therapy. What seems to be most revered is what is ‘new.’ As therapy practitioners and researchers, we are therefore confronted with some important questions: Are we destined to continue to forget what we know and instead focus on what is new? Will it always be the case that we emphasize who, not what, is right? Will the field forever be characterized by ‘dogma eat dogma?’ Is there nothing about psychotherapy about which we can agree?
Having spent approximately 60 years teaching, researching, supervising, and practicing psychotherapy—and ruminating all these years about these questions—I believe that one day we will have answers to them. In the meantime, where do we stand? I would suggest that there are indeed a few things we have learned over the years from the convergence of both clinical observation and psychotherapy research that can provide a crude, if not basic understanding of a few points of agreement …”
You can read more from here.
