Psychotherapy Models: A Historical Perspective

The chapter exposes a brief history of psychotherapy following the framework of “scientific revolutions”, as advanced by Thomas Kuhn. Although philosophers and theologians have been preoccupied since ancient times with the sources of human suffering and its alleviation, psychotherapy only emerged in incipient forms in the 19th century. We will briefly present the major paradigms in psychotherapy—psychoanalytic-psychodynamic, humanistic-experiential-existential, systemic, and cognitive-behavioral—and we will discuss the most prominent schools, their core principles and treatment strategies, as well as their evidence base. Also, we will discuss the evolution of the field by analyzing its similarity with and divergence from the general theory of the scientific revolutions.