Tony Ward - Cognitive Psychodynamics as an Integrative Framework in Counselling Psychology and Psychotherapy

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Hundreds, if not thousands, of psychotherapy methods have been described. If you have a very liberal mind, you can rejoice in such an offer: A chacun son bonheur! (as they say in the bazars of France). Indeed, such a profusion, undoubtedly a reflection of the complexity and creativity of the human mind, could be welcomed if we had tools to guide clients in choosing a therapy. However, to our knowledge, there is no unified framework where the different types of therapy can be described, their specificities mapped and their indications outlined.

In fact, each school of therapy is rather accustomed to developing on its own account, each claiming to be well founded in clinical experience. The universe of psychotherapies seems to the naive psychology student somewhat compartmentalized between the worlds of these different schools. In particular, a deep canyon seems to separate the bases of cognitive-behavioural therapies from those of psychodynamic or existential therapies. Some build on experimental psychology, others on intuitions about subjective life and the experience of the relationship. The person-centred approach may offer a bridge across this canyon, being concerned both with rooting in science and relying on subjective experience. The fundamental attitudes put forward by Rogersempathy for the subjects inner world, fundamental trust in his/her resources, congruence within the therapists worldwhilst they have inspired all schools of therapy, have so far been unlikely to achieve precise scientific operationalization.

However, advances in cognitive science today make it possible to rely on precise and rigorous tools, supported experimentally, whilst at the same time drawing on the most fertile insights from psychodynamic or existential approaches. For example, it has become possible to propose much more precise constructions of the notion of the inner world , as we will show in this book. It is no longer a utopia to envisage a unified framework where the models proposed by the various psychotherapy schools can be integrated, or even develop tailor-made therapeutic methods targeted according to the clients inner worlds. New fields may even have to be explored in psychopathology and psychotherapy, since contemporary cognitive science makes it possible to explore new dimensions of mental life that have hitherto largely escaped scientific knowledge, such as love, imagination, art or scientific creativity itself.

The aim of this book is to propose the first steps towards a cognitive-psychodynamic approach. After recalling the current context of psychotherapy in Chapter , we will summarize our key ideas and suggest directions for future developments in inner travel and therapy.

We would like to thank our respective universities, the University of the West of England, Bristol, and Universit Paris 8, St. Denis, France, for their support over many years. We would also like to thank our colleagues in psychology and the many students we have worked with, who have helped us to reflect on and refine our ideas. At Paris 8, we would especially like to thank the successive directors of the Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie, Michle Montreuil and Marie-Carmen Castillo, for their support of innovative research over many years. Finally, we would like to thank all the clients we have worked with in many different settings, who have helped us to develop our clinical ideas and theories. We have felt privileged to be able to meet the inner worlds of our clients and in turn to have our own inner worlds changed by the encounter. We are also grateful to the review Annales Mdico-Psychologiques , Dr. Mirabel-Sarron and Dr. Nicolas Delrue for allowing us to take up in Chapters some of the cases already mentioned in this journal (note that in the text, previously published case material is identified where relevantall other case vignettes are an anonymized amalgamation of issues adapted from a number of clients).