Cultural-historical models of verification the effectiveness of psychotherapy

Abstract

The article analyses the leading trends and methods used in studies on the efficiency of psychotherapy from the cultural-historical perspective. The article stresses that experimental-examining methods are applied for verification of psycho­therapeutic effects within the classical approach; this approach is represented by meta-analyzes, i.e. a statistical combination of data from several studies. The main effects of cognitive-behavioral therapy were confirmed by this way. During the crisis of modernism, hermeneutic methods and the non-classical approaches to evaluate the psychotherapy results became popular; they were used primarily for psychodynamic therapies. During the early postmodern period, the post-non-classical approach to psychotherapy evaluation was developed; here, existential-phenomenological analysis of psychotherapeutic cases was used. The linguistic turn in late postmodern psychotherapy was based on various discursive analyses and, first of all, the intent-analysis. In addition, narrative analysis could be presented as a verbalized triangular model that takes into account deep intentions and the social context of a client’s life. The latest era of meta-modernism proposes a new turn to performance in psychotherapy, when quantitative and qualitative methods testing psychotherapy efficiency are united and used flexibly, as well as the methods of artistic and aesthetic development of reality are applied in the form of art therapy and involved into result evaluation.