Social Learning and Clinical Psychology

"The clinical psychologist after leaving the university and obtaining his first job is subject to two major pressures. On one hand is the pressure created by his training, which directs him toward caution, skepticism of generalizations, and a desire to restrict his activities to sound scientific principles, tested methods, and "approved" theories. On the other hand, his professional co-workers have little patience with his academic qualifications of statements and his long-winded statements of probabilities. They are averse to trying things out on patients. They want something done and want it done immediately. Under these pressures the clinical psychologist is usually forced to compromise. He may maintain the scientific rigor of his experimental methods in research, but in his daily work, because of the need to help patients immediately, he relies more and more on experience and empirical methods. Because of these pressures, the practice of clinical psychology in many instances is unsystematic and confused when viewed from logical or rigorous scientific viewpoints. This confusion, however, is not a necessary condition but the result of the failure of the clinical psychologists' training program to translate and relate the basic knowledge of experimental and theoretical psychology into the practical situations of the clinic, the hospital, and the school. The purpose of this book is to arrive at a systematic theory from which may be drawn specific principles for actual clinical practice, and to illustrate some of the more important applications of the theory to the practice. Rather than attempt to apply this theory to all the problems facing the clinical psychologists, we have chosen to apply it to only two of the clinician's most important problems--the measurement of personality (personality diagnosis) and psychotherapy. Even in these broad areas the application ++