Do Boundaries Inhibit the Growth of New Psychologies?

www.eastsideinstitute.org I was trained in developmental, not clinical, psychology, and I do not practice psychotherapy. I study it. I study it because I find the therapeutic activity, in particular, the social therapeutic activity, to be fascinatingly paradoxical—simultaneously exhilarating and tedious, intense and trivial, touchingly meaning making and incomprehensible, an extraordinary life-affirming creative act whose materials are often anything but life affirming. Moreover, as a researcher into human development, studying therapy has become important to me because of its developmental potential or, to use the terminology of the humanistic psychology tradition, its potential for experiences of actualization and transcendence. Since I began my research career, about thirty-five years ago, I’ve always studied things that are very difficult to study—some, I’ve discovered, even impossible to study—unless you go outside the bounds of the existing research paradigm. The first time I encountered this was in my study of language acquisition and development at Teachers College, Columbia University in the early 1970s. The existing paradigm looked at grammar an