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Chapter Twelve – Implications for Theory, Practice and Research – Page 335
of working have been variously dismissed or ignored. There are two strands that I wish
to weave here.
First, within the clinical field of psychological therapies, there have been attempts in the
last decade to posit a ‘third wave’ of behavioural psychotherapy (Hayes, Strosahl, &
Wilson, 1999), with the first being seen as the emergence of the behavioural approach
(including both classical and operant conditioning), the second the re-introduction of
cognition by writers such as Beck and Ellis (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979; Ellis,
1994), and the third the emergence of a recognition of the importance of individual
subjectivity and meaning and challenges to what Hayes et al. term ‘the myth of healthy
normality’.
Second, this strand meets another from within psychodynamic psychotherapy, that is the
gradual accumulation and integration of models for research (e.g. Wampold, 2001) and
findings (e.g. Shedler, 2010). Wampold has demonstrated how research models
originated for the evaluation of drug treatments have failed to access and evaluate the
effective components of psychotherapy, which require what Wampold has articulated as
a ‘Contextual Model’. Shedler has demonstrated that although the literature is smaller
than for approaches such as cognitive-behavioural therapy which are ostensibly easier to
evaluate, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are highly effective and
that their impacts persist and increase after therapy is complete. Furthermore, in
addition to evidence that the process underlying cognitive approaches may not be as
proposed by the authors of those approaches (e.g. Longmore and Worrell, 2007), where
these forms of psychotherapy have assumed a position of being incontrovertibly
evidence-based, in fact it may be that aspects of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic