es, but awakens immediately when her own child is moaning. “It is just like the situation of the mother Pavlov wrote about,” explained Dr. Dosužkov, “with enough experience, you will be able to maintain connection with your client even when you fall asleep.” But Dr. Dosužkov’s explanation was clearly flawed. What a therapist considers relevant in the client’s narrative reflects his or her training and personal bias. An Adlerian, Rankian, or Jungian therapist would have awakened at different times of the session – each at the moment when my narrative would bring something that, according to their training and judgment, was “relevant”. Because of the great conceptual differences between the schools of depth psychology, the question naturally arises as to which ones offer a more correct understanding of the human psyche in health and disease. If it were true that correct and properly timed interpretations are a significant factor in psychotherapy, one would expect to find great differences in the therapeutic success achieved by various schools. Their therapeutic results could be mapped on a Gaussian curve; therapists of the school with the most accurate understanding of the psyche and, therefore, most fitting interpretations would have the best results, while those belonging to orientations with less accurate conceptual frameworks would be distributed on the descending parts of the curve. I do not know of any scientific studies that show clear superiority of some schools of psychotherapy over others, as measured by outcomes. If anything, the differences are found within the schools rather than between them – and such differences result from variations in the skills of the therapists within any given school. In each school there are better therapists and worse therapists. And, very likely, the therapeutic results have very little to do with what the therapists think they are doing, such as the accuracy and good timing of interpretations, correct analysis of transference, tactical use of silence, and other specific interventions. Successful therapy probably depends on factors that are unrelated to intellectual brilliance and are difficult to describe in scientific language – the “quality of the human encounter” between therapists and clients, the feeling of the clients that they are unconditionally accepted by another human being, frequently for the first time in their life, because they have not experienced it in their own family of origin. Additional factors could be the amount of time and quality of attention that the clients give to their unconscious processes or the strength of hope and expectations that the client feels during the therapeutic process. In their remarkable comprehensive books Jerome Frank, Julia Frank, and Renato Alarcón discussed the challenges associated with the attempts to measure the effects of psychotherapy and to contrast schools and related theories with one another (Frank and Frank 1993; Alarcón and Frank 2011). They showed clearly the difficult methodological problems that these endeavors encounter. Metaanalyses have produced some evidence that psychotherapy can have positive effects, but failed to detect significant differences between the therapeutic success of various competing schools of psychotherapy or of experienced therapists and novices. 22 (20) Stanislav Grof
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