ABSTRACT
The design sets upper limits on the potential of the particular study for yielding facts about psychotherapy, suggesting useful hypotheses for future testing, or merely supplying limited scraps of sample-specific information. A cursory review will permit the mention of some of the main ways in which psychotherapy research designs can be characterized. Psychotherapy is used as a generic term that includes the entire gamut of specialize approaches. The usual conception of those "psychological principles" involved in psychotherapy is restricted to the verbal exchanges between therapist and patient. However, the great number of variables involved in the most simple relationship between two persons offers much broader possibilities in theory and in practice for the modification of personality. Attitudinal polarization toward psychotherapy and toward psychotherapeutic research has developed. Research in psychotherapy poses its own set of unique problems in each of these requirements.
