Abstract

According to the authors, there are two distinct sets of underlying philosophical presumptions of psychotherapy science today: mainstream, well-established assumptions drawing on empirism, determinism, reductionism and mechanism and relatively new, alternative ones, here traced back to the concepts of intentionality, wholeness and analogical thinking. The current state of affairs in this field is a result of historical developments in Western science. In the antiquity and Middle Ages, truth was based on confirmation by authority rather than empirical experience. Only from renaissance onwards, experiment became the primary tool. In the modern era, the objective truth was thus to be found through verifiable, repeatable observations by several individuals and repeated, repeatable and standardised measurements of phenomena.