This article summarizes the results from the Intervention Work Group of the Competencies Conference: Future Directions in Education and Credentialing in Professional Psychology. The generic charge presented to the Intervention Work Group was "to address issues related to interventions." The Intervention Work Group identified four competency components of knowledge, skills, and abilities: (a). foundational competencies; (b). intervention planning; (c). intervention implementation; and (d). intervention evaluation competencies. A fifth component that included "practice management" was labeled as "others." Each component is discussed, including competencies that were deemed an essential knowledge, skill, and/or value. A discussion of training for intervention competence and assessing that intervention competence is included. Future directions for the science and practice of psychology in the intervention arena are summarized. This is one of a series of articles published in this issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Several other articles that resulted from the Competencies Conference will appear in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice and The Counseling Psychologist.

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Efforts to investigate psychotherapy experimentally have been criticized on the grounds that the subject matter under investigation is thereby destroyed or distorted. Some have concluded, for this reason, that "real" psychotherapy is not amenable to investigation under highly controlled conditions. Others agree with Krasner (1962, p. 253) that psychotherapy can be viewed as an experimental phenomenon, whether the immediate object is experimental investigation or not: ". . . there is far too strong an implication of psychotherapy as being a 'natural' process upon which we work from a respectful distance so as not to distort it. Psychotherapy is not an inherent natural process, but rather a highly artificial, even an experimental, laboratory situation.