The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Psychology: a Giant with Feet of Clay

“…Within this controversy, the theoretical chaos in the psychotherapeutic field is perhaps much wider (Melchert, 2016;Goldfried, 2018). Although conciliatory efforts do exist, most of the psychotherapeutic concepts are used in the specific context in which they were first formulated and are being ignored, even mocked, by other "schools of thought" (Krantz, 1987;Tracy, Robins & Gosling, 2005). The definition of psychotherapeutic constructs is just as confusing.…”

“…First, does the word "paradigm(s)" fit the "schools of thought" in a proper sense? The answer is largely controversial, and some authors have fairly proposed to use the word "sub-discipline" instead (Friman, Allen, Kerwin, & Larzelere, 1993), a suggestion that has been adopted by other studies in this field alongside the term "school" (Robins, Gosling & Craik, 1999;Tracy et al, 2005;Norcross, Karpiak & Santoro, 2005;Spear, 2007). Here, we will use the word "approach", "theory" or "trend" because the term "sub-discipline" or "school" might implicitly suggest that these views are completely incompatible with each other when they are not.…”

“…Consistent with the considerations about the experimental method applied to conceptual disputes, we based our commentary only on existing empirical literature on "historical trends" in psychology (Robins et al, 1999;Tracy et al, 2005;Norcross et al, 2005;Spear, 2007). 11 These studies assessed the prominence of every theory thanks to particular bibliometric measures;…”

“…11 Moreover, our focus has been exclusively on these studies because we wanted to avoid the systematic positive distortion of a researchers' point of view towards his own theory (Tracy et al, 2005). This bias could potentially affect all qualitative historical analysis.…”

“…Despite all these limitations, since the intention was to have an overall idea about conflicts between different theories, we believe that such analysis may satisfactorily reach our aim. In summary, what emerges from these papers is that the neuro-cognitive approach is undoubtedly the most popular nowadays in psychology (Tracy et al, 2005;Spear, 2007). On the other hand, in clinical psychology, cognitive and eclectic/integrative approaches appear to be the most implemented (Norcross et al, 2005).…”