Sources for Psychotherapy’s Improvement and Criteria for Psychotherapy’s Efficacy

The publication of the first issue of Frontiers is a happy occasion. In this editorial, I take the opportunity to share my vision of it becoming the forum for clinicians to test their insights and interventions with colleagues of various theoretical views, by means of thoughtful articles and follow-up commentaries. I also share how I use the principles of the journal’s mission statement in my clinical practice and writings. Among other expectations and suggestions, that statement encourages authors to (a) demonstrate how related disciplines help us improve psychotherapy for persons with complex trauma-related disorders related disciplines; (b) report the psychological, behavioral and/or social outcomes that they use as criteria for success. Here, I share my gratification with using concepts and findings from social psychology and anthropology, how they helped me understand the interpersonal operations of power abuse. I learned about the function of intimacy in good caretaking. When a child fears reasons like selfishness or neglect for the caretaker’s failure to fulfill the child’s expectations, caretakers ordinarily relinquish their power to deceive the child. Instead, they disclose such reasons and promise to prove their intention to remedy them, as the child understands proof of that intention. I learned how untrustworthy caretakers abuse that principle of intimacy. That, in turn, helped me discern my patients’ specific fixation from such childhood experience, a flawed working model about the interpersonal operations of intimacy. I have treated it as their fundamental impairment while they suffer disorder during crises of trust in later relationships. Therefore, I measure my psychotherapy’s efficacy in degrees of correcting that impairment. I measure it in my patients’ competence to cultivate intimacy for restoration of trust in their troubled relationships.