Can psychotherapists transcend the shackles of their training and superstitions?

Formal courses and training in psychological diagnosis and treatment often undermine the talents and skills with which many trainees are endowed naturally. Too many seem to acquire a stylized professionalism replete with general labels, questionable theories, and unfortunate proscriptions. Despite lip service paid to prescriptive eclecticism, most graduate programs socialize their students into delimited schools of thought. Meanwhile, hundreds of psychotherapeutic systems have proliferated. Unsubstantiated claims abound. Nevertheless, there are data that show that specific treatments of choice exist for many disorders. It is argued that a multimodal, systematic, technically eclectic model can point the way to a genuinely scientific approach to psychotherapy.