Generic Psychotherapy

Purpose

During the past generation we have been besieged with many kinds of psychotherapy. If you think of the various kinds of psychotherapy - psychoanalysis, behavior therapy, cognitive restructuring, gestalt therapy, etc., as various brand names, then generic psychotherapy can be thought of as an effort to explore the active ingredients which underlie each form of therapy. This web site is devoted to seeking what is generic in the various treatment modalities. What are the fundamental active ingredients that operate in every form of therapy? Can essential psychological parameters, analogous to the basic quantities of physics: length, mass, and time be found to define the "space" of psychotherapy? The outcome of this exploration can then form the basis of generic psychotherapy. This site invites contributions from professionals, students, and patients. Indeed, the World Wide Web offers a unequaled prospect of obtaining experiences about what produces effective psychotherapy from both the consumers and the providers of the treatment.

Web Folk Hypertexts

The World Wide Web offers a unique opportunity to engage in a new form of text book development. The text books that we were all exposed to in school or college are static documents that we had no part in creating. They presented material in ways that we often found hard to understand. This generic psychotherapy web site is an experiment in developing a text that is generated by the folk in the web community. The idea of folk hypertext is different from interest groups or usenet groups because it is structured with the intent of producing a coherent evolving web based hypertext that is accessible and useful to professionals students and patients.

Contributions

Your active participation is essential in order to provide the materials needed to give a broad range of insights about what fosters effective psychotherapy. An important aspect of this work is to get replies from people who are or who have been in psychotherapy describing what has been helpful for them. It is crucial to understand what patients find helpful in their treatment. If you have been in treatment and would like to participate in this survey please complete the patient's form. If you are a therapist and would to share your insights about what is generic to psychotherapy please complete the therapist's form. Potential contributors are referred to a list of various subject areas. If you have expertise in one or more of these areas, original writing on the subject, citations of relevant literature, or other sources, including web sites, please e-mail to William Dubin wd16@columbia.edu. If you have any problems using the forms, or if you have comments or suggestions your contributions will be greatly appreciated. In order to make the material more readily accessible it would be very helpful for us to get clinical examples.

The following is a set of navigational aids to help you finding your way around this web site:

• Philosophy & Structure This is the place to start for a general overview of the ideas central to generic psychotherapy.
• Basic Orientation Concepts are a set ideas which have been developed to untangle some of the confusions that are sometimes found in discussions of psychotherapy. The basic concepts are was of ordering ones thinking about ideas that are commonly found in psychotherapy.
• Glossary is a list of definitions of some of the concepts found in generic psychotherapy.
• References to publications cited on these pages.
• Psychotherapy Subject Areas are some areas that have been explored in writings about psychotherapy.
• This is an interactive site. Your impression and observation are vital to the development of generic psychotherapy. So before you leave please give your reactions on the forms listed below.
• Therapist's Form is a form for therapists to give their views about what makes psychotherapy effective.
• Patient's Form is a form for patients who have been in psychotherapy to describe what was helpful for them while they were in treatment.
• Comments Form is a form for reactions about and suggestions of ways to improve to any of the materials found on these pages.
• Examples Form is a form for giving examples that might clarify and or expand any of the concepts discussed on this site.
• Up to Top of This Page

The page's Web_Counter says that your are visitor number

Site Maintained by William Dubin, Ph.D. wd16@columbia.edu 212 889 3665.