Michael Basseches – författare

For all those engaged in psychotherapy practice, regardless of modality or approach, the goal of this book is to provide a framework and method for thinking about their work that allows for critical reflection on their own successes and disappointments, and on the similarities and differences among their own and other practitioners’ work with different clients. The authors use a novel "common factors" approach, based on the idea that some form of development is the outcome of all effective psychotherapy, despite other differences that may exist. While most existing psychotherapy research focuses on treatment outcomes, primarily in terms of symptom reduction, this book offers an alternative research approach that systematically tracks the psychotherapy process itself, and describes each case’s unique developmental outcome. In particular, Basseches & Mascolo focus on the questions of what kinds of therapeutic resources therapists are offering to their clients and whether and how clients are able to make use of these resources in the service of their own development. The goal is to provide a descriptive framework that can be used to appreciate the highly varied ways in which particular therapists tailor their work to unique clients’ developmental needs, while at the same time offering a prescription of a more rigorous method for recognizing and correcting the problem when a particular therapist’s way of working is not serving the client well. Ideally, this type of process-focused research will complement existing outcome research, and be more likely than further symptom-reduction studies to result in the improvement of overall psychotherapy success rates.

This book describes and illustrates the nature of dialectical thinking as a cognitive psychological phenomenon, and makes the case that this form of cognitive organizaton is a possible successor to the adolescent formal operations stage. It uses the idea of dialectical thinking to organize theory and research on adult forms of reasoning about specific kinds of issues into a rich and coherent conceptual framework for the study of adult development. This framework makes feasible an approach to the study of adult development firmly rooted in the genetic epistemological tradition as an alternative to the approaches which currently dominate the field.

For all those engaged in psychotherapy practice, regardless of modality or approach, the goal of this book is to provide a framework and method for thinking about their work that allows for critical reflection on their own successes and disappointments, and on the similarities and differences among their own and other practitioners’ work with different clients. The authors use a novel "common factors" approach, based on the idea that some form of development is the outcome of all effective psychotherapy, despite other differences that may exist. While most existing psychotherapy research focuses on treatment outcomes, primarily in terms of symptom reduction, this book offers an alternative research approach that systematically tracks the psychotherapy process itself, and describes each case’s unique developmental outcome. In particular, Basseches & Mascolo focus on the questions of what kinds of therapeutic resources therapists are offering to their clients and whether and how clients are able to make use of these resources in the service of their own development. The goal is to provide a descriptive framework that can be used to appreciate the highly varied ways in which particular therapists tailor their work to unique clients’ developmental needs, while at the same time offering a prescription of a more rigorous method for recognizing and correcting the problem when a particular therapist’s way of working is not serving the client well. Ideally, this type of process-focused research will complement existing outcome research, and be more likely than further symptom-reduction studies to result in the improvement of overall psychotherapy success rates.

This book explores the concept of “socially-responsible psychology in a global age” and how it might be used to organize, integrate and bring enhanced focus a field that has the potential to contribute to solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. In this volume, the editors explore the central and defining features of socially-responsible psychology, challenges that this work would face, and the mechanisms and processes by which psychological work could be synergistically integrated with the work of other disciplines.  For this purpose, the volume also examines a variety of factors currently that limit psychology in carrying out this goal.