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Theory & Psychology
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Psychotherapy without Foundations?'

Hermeneutics, Discourse and the End of Certainty

John Stancombe

Cherry Tree Hospital Stockport, UK

Susan White

University of Manchester, Sue.white{at}man.ac.uk

Over the last decade the therapeutic industry has begun to question the foundations for its own knowledge claims. Unable to retreat into logico-empiricism and naive realism because of its own internal critique of these philosophical positions, it has sought solace in hermeneutics and postfoundationalist epistemology. Through an examination of debates within psychotherapy process research, it is possible to chart the development of this linguistic turn. The end of the search for therapeutic certainties has certain repercussions which have, hitherto, been neglected by theorists and clinicians, whose desire to escape some of the constraints of scientism sits uneasily alongside an unshakeable commitment to therapeutic practices which are essentially normative.

Key Words: contingency • narrative • postfoundationalism • research • therapy

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 8, No. 5, 579-599 (1998)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354398085001
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