The Process of Psychotherapy: Causation and Chance

Description

This book describes an encompassing modeling approach to psychotherapy, created with the most recent research in the field. Therapeutic interventions are staged within a therapist-client relationship ('alliance'), and become effective by the interplay of deterministic ('causation') and stochastic ('chance') forces. The authors use a Fokker-Planck approach complemented by a structural-mathematical framework from complexity theory. Chapters present statistical tools, which can be applied to analyze the differing time series that depict therapeutic processes. Chapters include examples of how to use these tools within research. The approach adopted in the book – contemporary psychotherapy terminology combined with a systems-theoretical model and algorithms for quantitative psychotherapy research – has the potential to become the new benchmark in psychotherapy. The Process of Psychotherapy is an informative and sophisticated resource for all levels of students, from undergraduate through post-doctoral studies, in the fields of psychology, cognitive psychology, and psychotherapy. Front Matter ....Pages i-xv Causation and Chance: Integrating the Dynamical Systems Approach with Statistical Thinking (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 1-20 Psychopathological Problems and Disorders (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 21-30 Interventions in Psychotherapy (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 31-40 The Fokker-Planck Equation (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 41-58 Application to Psychotherapy: Deterministic Interventions (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 59-70 Application to Psychotherapy: Chance Interventions (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 71-80 Application to Psychotherapy: The Mixture of Deterministic and Stochastic Interventions (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 81-92 The One- and Two-Dimensional Fokker-Planck Equation (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 93-119 Modeling Empirical Time Series (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 121-152 Outlook (Wolfgang Tschacher, Hermann Haken)....Pages 153-167 Back Matter ....Pages 169-172