Book Review: All Therapy Books

Published: Nov. 24, 2019, 1:15 p.m.

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Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/book-review-all-therapy-books/

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All therapy books start with a claim that their form of therapy will change everything. Previous forms of therapy have required years or even decades to produce ambiguous results.\\xa0Our\\xa0form of therapy can produce total transformation in five to ten sessions! Previous forms of therapy have only helped ameliorate the stress of symptoms.\\xa0Our\\xa0form of therapy destroys symptoms at the root!

All psychotherapy books bring up the\\xa0Dodo Bird Verdict\\xa0\\u2013 the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are \\u201cnonspecific factors\\u201d like how much patients like their therapist. Some people might think this suggests\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy will only be about as good as other forms. This, all therapy books agree, would be a foolish and perverse interpretation of these findings. The correct interpretation is that all previous forms of therapy must be equally wrong. The only reason they ever produce good results at all is because sometimes therapists accidentally stumble into using\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy, without even knowing it. Since every form of therapy is about equally likely to stumble into using\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy, every other form is equally good. But now that\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy has been formalized and written up, there is no longer any need to stumble blindly! Everyone can just use\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy all the time, for everything! Nobody has ever done a study of\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy. But when they do, it\\u2019s going to be amazing! Nobody has even invented numbers high enough to express how big the effect size of\\xa0our\\xa0form of therapy is going to be!

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