Review of Psychotherapy as a human science

Reviews the book, Psychotherapy as a human science by Daniel Burston and Roger Frie (see record 2006-12980-000). In this book, the authors show how philosophical assumptions pervade therapeutic praxis. "In our view, philosophy is inherent to the very practice of psychotherapy" (p. 2). There is a "common ground that unites the therapists of today with the philosophers of the past" (p. 17). Their effort succeeds brilliantly in reconnecting psychology and philosophy and, by that homecoming, to ground psychotherapy (including contemporary psychoanalysis) as a "human science." The book begins by sketching ideas about truth we inherit from the Greeks, then shows how Descartes and Pascal helped launch the Enlightenment with their thinking about truth and the limits of reason. Kant, Hegel, and Marx broaden the scope to include reason, the unconscious, and the course of history. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche interject angst and authenticity. Dilthey proposes a human science neither scientistic nor irrational. Husserl launches phenomenology as the proper study of experience; Scheler, Jaspers and Heidegger react in their particular ways. Freud and Jung come to loggerheads over the unconscious. Buber, Binswanger, and Boss further develop existential-phenomenological perspectives in terms of human interrelatedness. Confrontation with the other and the limits of reciprocity engage Sartre, Lacan, and Laing. Psychoanalysis grows intersubjectively through the work of Sullivan, Fromm, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, and Stolorow. Postmodernism's excess, Frie and Burston conclude, requires acknowledgment of an authentic self answerable for choices in life: '...[W]e are both determined by, and exercise our agency in determining, the communicative contexts in which we exist" (p. 262). Psychotherapy from this existential-phenomenological perspective becomes "a rigorous exploration of our ways of making meaning--both consciously and unconsciously" (p. 263). The book ends, then, with an affirmation of life and a call to action. All these thinkers, all these generations of lives lived, all this seeking of meaning and purpose, explanation and doubt, all this is our human lot, inherited equally. Each of us must choose, consciously or not, what to do about it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).