Book Review: Psychotherapy Process Research: Paradigmatic and Narrative Approaches

I was particularly interested in being given the opportunity to review this new book from the Sage publishing house as it addresses two main theoretical areas that I am currently interested in as a postgraduate student in counselling psychology, namely the psychological process that may be occurring in Psychotherapeutic endeavours, and the emergence of humane and meaningful approaches that might facilitate the illumination and analysis of such processes.

For some time, and particularly during the sixties and seventies psychotherapy process research has been driven by the orthodox logico-scientific paradigm characterised by attempts to derive general laws concerning human behaviour through the formulation and testing of specific hypotheses, together with the collection and statistical analysis of quantitative data. The subject matter under investigation has to a large extent been influenced by Roger's propositions concerning the importance of therapists creating those conditions that were deemed to be necessary and sufficient for clients to undergo Psychotherapeutic change.

The approaches discussed in this particular book represent a major departure from previous such psychotherapy process research both in terms of content and methods of enquiry. Toukmanian and Rennie's text consists of individual chapters each one written by contemporary American psychotherapy process researchers, with each chapter providing an outline and discussion of fine investigators individual methodological approach to their particular area of enquiry into the Psychotherapeutic process.

Each chapter comprises an illustrative and unique "window" into the typical therapy sessions, the particular Psychotherapeutic phenomena under scrutiny including; helping and hindering processes, analysis of the cognitive tasks involved in intrapersonal conflict resolution, clients' perceptual processes, analysis and recall of significant and change events in therapy, and metaphorical communication between client and therapist

Most researchers contributing to the text describe the employment of audio-visual technology in order to capture narrative data and enable post therapy session analysis. Post session analyses were conducted by a combination of clients, therapists and/or trained observers, being facilitated by the employment of methodological refinements of Kagan's Interpersonal Process Recall techniques. As a consequence, the studies reported created a wealth of narrative data, and thus enabled the potential generation of grounded theoretical propositions.

The editors conclude with a final chapter in which they discuss the preceding studies with reference to five discrete dimensions of process research, against which paradigmatic and narrative research methods can be compared, concluding that future research would be best served by a methodological pluralism and epistemological synthesis, drawn from both the paradigmatic and narrative approaches.

Toukmanian and Rennie's text comprises yet another important addition to the growing literature on Psychotherapeutic processes and the emergence of more humane and meaningful approaches to human enquiry. In my view however the book focuses more explicitly on the former than the latter.

Jon Goble