Are we better as a field? An Interview with Bruce Wampold, Ph.D.

Dr. Bruce Wampold has had a long and distinguished career as a psychotherapy outcome researcher. In this wide-ranging interview, he looks back on what has (and has not) been accomplished as a field, identifies the most promising findings of the last 40 years, and speaks about what's needed and likely to happen in the future.

[@pbziegler]

Wow. Looking around You Tube look who popped up. Two men who changed how I thought about, practiced and taught therapy. That week with you , Scott, at the workshop with Walter and Peller, was a watershed in my clinical professional life as you know. And, watching this interview I am reminded that the key in the effectiveness in the clinician can be summed up in the two words "purposeful responsiveness." I trained in aikido for 13 years and all those thousands of hours of training and practice with so many different training partners I didn't learn how to do specific techniques better. I learned how to respond to every unique training partner in every instance of the partner's attack so whatever attack they employed and whatever unique emotional and physical characteristics they brought to our encounter I instinctively knew how to blend and lead. Loved the restaurant server analogy and the whole conversation. You guys made a difference.

[@dlmore1208]

Hi Scott, How fortuitous that I happened upon this interview with Wampold shortly after it was posted ! I have a couple comments and curiosities.
First, I marked Wampold's point that we therapists entered the medical/scientific field "way back when" ( I believe it was the 60's), when professionals started seeking payments from insurance companies, coming to define "conditions," and "treatments," and so on in order to receive reimbursements, apparently benefitting us economically, and perhaps even patients who no longer had to pay full fees directly. I have always thought this was a terrible mistake, placing therapy under the institutional umbrella of medicine; - I have always believed that therapy is primarily an educational (not medical) enterprise, and thus its true home, then and now, is there -- in the insitution of education
Second, I am deeply surprised by lack of mention and reference to what to me, as a beginning therapist of the early 70's, was a robust empirical and practice tradition of the time that explicitly focused on the theorizing, measurement, and training of interpersonal skills and their place in therapy. Of course Rogers started it all, but has the field fogotten the work of Truax and (especially to me) Robert Carkhuff, among others ? Wasn't the delivery of conditions empathy, respect, genuineness, concreteness, self-disclosure, immediacy, confrontation -- measured in a variety of ways, and used in the training of helpers of different sorts ? I can still think of a number of (clinically) powerful understandings that I took from that tradition, such as that therapists offering high levels of facilitative conditions (yes, they used that term) had better results with patients regardless of their degree (or even no degree). That trainees were LESS able to offer high levels the longer they had been in graduate school. That those students most skilled often led "tenuous graduate school existences." That direct training and practice focused on these condtions (measurably) improved trainees' abilities to offer them in actual therapy sessions..... I am not lauding the conceptual or research sophistication of this 50+ year-old tradition, or comparing it to the current scientific scene -- but surely it deserves recognition and respect. Perhaps I am missing something large that obscures these contributions and explains why they became a dead end and forgotten in the current scene.
I very much aprreciate Wampold's long-term historical perspective and his temperate and broadly knowledgeable comments (yours, too), which made this a really satisfying conversation for me to tune into.

[@franciscoadame8460]

Great interview, thank you for your contribution to the field!

[@hsinglu]

You didn’t get scammed by the taxi? Everyone says not to use those taxis at airports in Vietnam and should only use grab instead