Theories Journal

 The article by Israeli & Santor (2000) highlights four unique aspects of feminist theory approaches to psychotherapy and discusses their use and efficacy. The four aspects include consciousness raising, social and gender role analysis, resocialization, and social activism. After reading this article, I am a little unclear as to if feminist theory views itself as an adjunct treatment to other therapies or as its own therapy that could be useful by itself for a variety of disorders. In many of the studies proposed, it appeared that feminist was combined with something else. This brings up the idea for me of the need for a theory, and the use of additive treatment and saying that it is useful. The famous example of this is the CBT + hat compared to waitlist trial and saying the hat therapy is effective. Although I do not think this is the case with feminist theory, the lack of well designed studies looking at its efficacy alone was a little surprising to me. However, this was an ...

In the Markowitz & Weissman (2012) article, the authors explain the history of interpersonal psychotherapy for depression as well as what key aspects of depression it emphasizes. Here, the authors discuss how IPT was among the first to use randomized clinical trials and wait to disseminate their research until they had done multiple tests. This made me think about the difference in psychology compared to other disciplines. In psychology, as long as a researcher can achieve a significant result, they can publish and spark interest in the field. Then, a therapist read the article and use some techniques proposed. Although this is part of the scientific process, it feels very different than science processes like food science or biology where some type of governing body has to approve of it based on the research in order to disseminate it to the public. Although the APA often comes out with lists of evidence based treatments, it is interesting that there is not much of a limit on what...

The Bornstein, 2005 discussed the phenomenon of psychoanalytic concepts being taken from the original discipline and transformed into non-psychoanalytic concepts. Throughout, the author makes the argument that those within the psychoanalytic tradition need to not only emphasize these instances of concepts being co-opted, but also to teach psychoanalysis in a way that does not bias students and the public against it. Although this is a good way of framing the issue, I wonder how feasible it is to continue doing this into the next 40-60 years. With new waves of therapy and mechanistic technology emerging, I wonder how motivated clinicians and researchers will be to continue fighting for psychoanalytic therapy. Throughout this article, I kept wondering at what point the argument chalks up to sunken cost fallacy. In general, it is hard to let go of a theory that a researcher has thought about a lot and has worked on for years. This is not to say that psychoanalytic concepts are not useful ...