ABSTRACT
Let us begin this final chapter by picking up a theme which Professor Beck alluded to in the foreword to the book. The application of a novel therapy to an area of clinical work needs to go through certain stages. It is as if the emergent therapy has a developmental history of its own, and is bound to a time course. Such a time course can be observed to have occurred in the application of systematic desensitisation to phobic problems, the application of social skills training to assertiveness problems, and the application of cognitive behaviour therapy to depression. It involves showing, first, that the therapy can work with individual case examples; second, that it does work with a group of such cases in a clinical series; third, that it works better than control conditions in a properly controlled clinical trial. When this has been achieved, two types of question then follow: (1) how does the therapy work in the conditions where it is known to work (e.g. cognitive therapy with depressed patients); and (2) can the therapy be applied to other clinical conditions outside the original domain in which it was developed. It is this second question which has been addressed in this book. Each potential application of the technique will have its own developmental stages to go through, beginning with uncontrolled case studies. Most of the work presented in this book is at this early stage, but this does not prevent us from learning a great deal which can contribute to our work as clinicians or teachers or researchers.
