Psychotherapy as Evidence-Based Process Management: A Contribution to Professionalism Beyond the Standard Model

Abstract

This contribution gives an interpretation of therapeutic interventions which is based on the principles of complex self-organizing systems. Usually, the standard model of how psychotherapy creates its effects is focusing on specific factors contained within specific interventions. Decades of psychotherapy research, however, have produced an amount of empirical anomalies to this model. An alternative understanding consists in the idea that interventions produce their potential outcome by resonance effects between the dynamics of the intervened system (i.e. the client) and the dynamics of the treatment or other meaningful system environments (outside or even within the client). By this, therapy is the continuous realization of the boundary conditions for self-organizing processes of the client’s mental and neural systems. Actually, this understanding is not metaphorical but has a very concrete meaning since Internetbased feedback systems are available to measure and analyze the present states of self-organizing processes (Synergetic Navigation System). This technology will have specific benefits to the client as well as to the therapist. Psychotherapy becomes an evidence-based and theoretically founded management process of the client’s systems dynamics. The base of the data driven evidence is the actual change process, not only the results of controlled outcome studies. Finally, the consequences for the role of interventions as well as for the profession of psychotherapy are discussed.