Abstract
This chapter attempts to provide a fresh look at the psychotherapy process from a contextual-epistemic perspective. Two areas will be carefully examined: symptom formation and symptom resolution. Fundamental questions will be raised, such as “What is a symptom?” “Who is the client?” and “Does a therapist ever cause change?” The ideas to follow, while perhaps unfamiliar at first, should become acceptable to readers if they temporarily relax some assumptions about the known world and our relationship to it. The metatheory of contextualism, as explicated by Pepper (1942) and advanced in psychology by Rosnow and Georgoudi (1986a), provides the basis for current theorizing.
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Germer, C.K. (1989). The Contextual-Epistemic Approach to Psychotherapy. In: Kramer, D.A., Bopp, M.J. (eds) Transformation in Clinical and Developmental Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3594-1_6
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