To Know or Not to Know: Science, Beliefs, and Values in Psychotherapy

Heward Wilkinson, International Journal of Psychotherapy, 2000, 5, 2, 93-102.

Abstract: This Editorial links the papers together in terms of how they relate to a debate/dialogue between a ‘belief-free’ and ‘experimental’ model of the values and beliefs of psychotherapy, and an integrationist, assimilative one. Through exploration of the papers, gradually the two positions come together in a synthesis, and the position of psychotherapy is portrayed as a phenomenological one, a creatively self-generating ‘idea’ in Cardinal Newman’s sense, though one which can encompass – but not be confined to – the position of ‘positive science’, with its focus on individual fact. The Editorial ends with a rectification of the injustice to Heidegger in the Editorial of July 1999, where it was claimed he was a lifelong Nazi, a claim now withdrawn in the light of Julian Young’s book on Heidegger, Philosophy and Nazism.