Introduction : Developing psychotherapeutic innovation and imagination through phenomenology and qualitative research with particular reference to the nature of therapeutic knowledge

Abstract

"What psychotherapeutic research has been of benefit to your practice?" I (Loewenthal) was asked the above question on completing many years as the Founding Research Chair of a national psychotherapy organisation. Partly to my amazement, and partly with a dawning realisation that this was something I had always known, I realised my answer was (and is) 'not much'! However, this answer is dependent on what is regarded as 'research'. At the time then, and even more so now, research, at the very least in the case of psychotherapy, was becoming and has become synonymous with 'empirical' research. Yet there is also research that is 'theoretical' and research that is based in 'practice'. In both of these latter cases, I can give far more examples where I think such research has benefitted my work innovatively and imaginatively with clients/patients. These three distinctions of 'practice, 'theoretical', and 'empirical' research might sometimes be seen as having some loose similarity to the 'exploratory: 'descriptive, and 'causal' research types denoted in the classic text by Selltiz et al. (1959).