Psychotherapy 2000 Some Predictions for the Coming Decade

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is prediction. It is bound to be proved wrong. Like long range weather forecasters and economists, psychotherapists are in an “impossible profession” (Freud, 1937), dealing with non-linear and therefore inherently unstable systems, unable to make accurate predictions about the future. But psychotherapists are familiar with uncertainty, and indeed perhaps actively cultivate it in order to work more creatively. Also, the development of chaos theory (Gleick, 1988) has now made vagueness a respectable topic for scientific inquiry.