Prof Raymond Tallis’s excellent review of Mark Solms’s book The Only Cure (12 January) underplays the lack of curiosity that is so striking in psychotherapy. The field’s insistence that “it works” and “research can’t be done” is counterintuitive, given its positioning as interested in people.
Creativity and imagination, as found in active scientific fields, would suggest designing trials of psychodynamic psychotherapy versus talking to an untrained person; or therapy versus a weekly gym membership; or long versus short therapy; or therapy versus an evening education class; or therapy versus waiting list (a classic test of interventions); or therapy versus cash transfer in this age of universal basic income and financial strain. Generating these ideas is not hard. Implementing them requires discipline.
