The Dodo's adolescence and adulthood: the development of common factors theory from first meta-analyses to Schiepek's synergetic nonlinear dynamic model

Abstract

After describing the Dodo’s early years ( the development of common factor theory from Rosenzweig to Frank’s contextual model) in a previous article, I continue with a review of the Dodo’s adolescence and adulthood, ranging from the first meta-analytical research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy to Schiepek’s nonlinear dynamic model. The third phase of research in psychotherapy (between 1970 and 1983) brought major improvements in research methodology, which enabled better studies of the therapeutic relationship and the development of meta-analyses that confirmed the high general efficacy of psychotherapy. On the one hand, efforts to standardize psychotherapeutic interventions intensified, while on the other hand, the Dodo encouraged efforts to integrate psychotherapeutic approaches and develop transtheoretical models. In the fourth phase (from 1984 to the present), paradigmatic shifts have occurred in both psychotherapeutic science and clinical practice, including for instance the shift from empirically supported therapies to evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, and to the flourishing of integrative and transdiagnostic approaches. The development of various conceptualizations of common factors and their empirical validation allowed the Dodo to enter adulthood by contributing, within Wampold's contextual model, to overcoming the dichotomy between therapeutic relationship and techniques. Schiepek's synergetic nonlinear dynamic model, however, provides insight into the dynamics of interactions between common and specific factors. Thus, psychotherapeutic science, from its beginnings in the 1920s until today, has reached a higher level of development with the help of the Dodo. Based on the abundance of clinical evidence and research findings, psychotherapy science now offers to practitioners of different approaches the possibility of a paradigmatic leap into a new, more integrated understanding of the profession of psychotherapy as an independent profession, into more efficient and effective forms of clinical practice and prevention as well as more comprehensive, didactically advanced forms of training. The Dodo goes beyond any particular psychotherapeutic school. As a meta-integrator it offers a vision for the broader integration of science and practice, biological, psychological and social, quantitative and qualitative methodology, nomotheticity and idiography, personalized medicine and psychotherapy and of the medical and contextual models.