Discomfort-Relief Quotient in Published Cases of Counseling and Psychotherapy.

摘要

Progress in psychotherapeutic research is dependent in part upon the isolation of specific processes which mediate therapeutic change. In order to get at such processes, a first step is to develop techniques of measurement which may be applied to the results of psychotherapy in the expectation that the basic processes may thereby be revealed. Such measurements should be capable of application to individual interviews as well as to cases as wholes, in order to define with precision the point at which therapeutic change occurs or starts to occur and the course which it subsequently follows. Information of this type would be invaluable in relation to assessing therapist or counselor activity as a factor in change as well as in giving rise to descriptions and ultimately to theories of the processes in the client that lead to therapeutic change. Research of this kind has not been abundant, but recently a number of students have begun to attend this problem. The 'non-directive' counselors have stressed the importance for research of verbatim recordings of psycho- therapeutic transactions, and a number of studies have been done in reference to the description especially of counselor response in non-directive interviews (see 9, 10). Raimy (7) has also studied certain aspects of the client's responses, centering his attention on the changes in the self-evaluation arising during treatment.