Thank You for your thoughtful response

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Thank you Jessica for your thoughtful response and especiaaly for your clarification of some CMT ideas. As you may have guessed, I am not well versed or overly familiar with CMT, although it does seem to be a rather intuitive integration of some of the richest underpinnings of the "great" theories of psychotherapy. At this point in my academic and professional development i am seeking to integrate my academic experience with psychoanalytic, cognitive, gestalt, family systems, and narrative therapeutic theories with my own background and commitment to philosophy of social science and my clinical training at the state hospital here in Austin, TX (and my pre-graduate work experience in public mental health). It seems as though the students and faculty here, and at other institutions where I know doctoral students, tend to divide along lines of theoretical allegiance. This is not too divisive for the most part, but is still salient. There are those, too, who claim to be "atheoretical" or eclectic," but personally I feel this is a basis in unexamined assumptions about what it means to be human, how we as humans know what we know, and the import that ignoring the culture of language and ideas in which we are all submerged has for us, as clinicians, theorists, and people. One of my current quests is to "make sense" of these groundings of being-in-the-world as a foundation for understanding, rationale, and applicative practice of being-with-others in the form of psychotherapy. I realize that I am using language and punctuation that might not be familiar to some people. The notions of being-in, being-for, and being-with are from the philosopher Martin Heidegger and his proponent, Hans-Georg Gadamer. These two, and other thinkers are from a tradition known as "Philosophical Hermeneutics," which developed from Schleirmacher's theories of biblical interpretation in the 19th century. This particular tradition emphasized situating the interpretation of (biblical) texts in the history, culture, and interpretations of the time the texts were originally written, the historical-critical interpretation of texts as opposed to literalism or de-contextualized interpretation. Without going into a tedious and complicated explication of philosophical hermeneutics, briefly, this tradition emphasizes that we humans are "self-interpreting beings" for whom things have significance, that the "self" is dialogical, or born, developing, and existing in dialogue, with our parents or original care-takers, and everyone and everything else that we encounter throughout life. This is not to say that the "self" is a mere linguistic construction, but that we are "thrown into" a world, culture(s), and languages verbal and non-verbal, that pre-exist us and that our existence as selves takes place inescapably within pre-existing and partially non-transparent (or imperceptible) "horizons of meaning." These horizons are not of our own construction, but we as developing selves participate in their expansion and reification. So, for example, pathogenic beliefs are a part of one's horizon of meaning, of how we make sense of and participate in the world. These horizons, abstractly, are neither good nor bad, they just are. We as humans collectively have deep, foundational notions of "the good" or virtue or meaning, which we variably strive towards as a project of our being-in-the-world. The CMT notion that we all strive towards a certain good, be it happiness, equitable and nurturing relationships to self and others, freedom to choose from a range of possibilities for living, or whatever (I hope I'm not mistakenly reading into CMT here, please let me know if that is the case) but are constrained by discursive practices (developmentally imposed or acquired beliefs) and their concommitant demands and consequences for violations of these demands makes really good sense from a perspective informed by philosophical hermeneutics (which I have incompletely described). At this point in my development, I find that what acquaintance I do have with CMT (mostly through a paper by Rappaport in the APA journal Psychotherapy, and the theoretical orientation of my own therapist- I know, that's a loaded offering!) helps me to make sense of psychotherapy given my own philosophical ccommitments, as a trainee, future clinician, academic, and as a partner in a therapeutic intersubjectivity. CMT seems to draw on some of the richest notions of both psychoanalytic and cognitive traditions of psychology. I have been fortunate to attend a doctoral program where no theoretical orientation is dominant, each member of our faculty is from a different tradition or are an integrationist. My mentor, Frank Richardson, is a proponant of hermeneutic inquiry of psychology, or as he puts it a "theoretical psychologist." This is represented in APA Division 24 THeoretical and Philosophical Psychology, which also includes postmodernists, narrativists, critical-marxists, and anybody else who is interested in philosophy and psychology. Frank was one of the early cognitivists and progressed from there to his current work in hermeneutic psychological inquiry.He has also been a therapist for 30 years but is not really a theorist of psychotherapy per say, but under his guidance, I have been encouraged to integrate philosophy and psychotherapy theory. I hope that i have not used too much jargon or not made sense, but i appreciate this forum as a place to learn what I so far have not learned in the classroom or in supervision. I appreciate also that the postings on this forum are for the most part genial and respectful, which is not the case on many other forums or discussion lists. Thanks again for your response and I hope to continue this conversation "as time goes by." August

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