The human sciences and psychotherapy have made remarkable progress, yet they remain relatively young disciplines. Many of the conditions required to achieve these aims have still not been fully worked out. Like the human sciences more generally, psychotherapy is marked by theoretical diversity, disagreement, and fragmentation. This is not accidental. The field has often been more concerned with producing plausible theories than with examining the foundations on which a reliable understanding of human experience can be built. Even where this foundational concern has appeared, it has not usually led to a sufficient overcoming of the key problems of cultural bias and over-intellectualisation — the Achilles’ heel of the human sciences.

As an applied field, psychotherapy has had to confront the implications of its own limitations. Historically, however, this practical conundrum has not led to a full confrontation with the epistemological challenge. Instead, the main solution has often been to reduce the visible role of theory and interpretation in the dialogue with clients. To avoid one danger, the profession has created another: precisely where careful understanding is most needed, therapy may become reluctant to investigate, clarify, or formulate deeply enough. It also leaves insufficiently examined the background assumptions that continue to shape the therapist’s perception, listening, and interventions.

Clients are therefore often left relying on a field that has not fully resolved its own internal problems. Psychotherapy has never sufficiently undergone its own therapeutic process: it has not examined itself deeply enough, clarified its own foundations, or freed itself from the inherited blockages that continue to shape its understanding of human experience. For this reason, much of the responsibility for advancing the theory and practice of psychotherapy has continued to rest with individual researchers and practitioners.