ABSTRACT
In 1958, the preeminent and pioneering psychotherapy researcher Hans Strupp wrote, “The therapist himself, his background, attitudes, experiences, and personality must be put under the microscope for careful scrutiny and analysis if valid knowledge about how to treat mental illness is to be obtained” (p. 34). With this rather bold statement, Strupp asserted that therapist factors, personal therapist factors, needed to be understood as part of a knowledge base about effective psychotherapy. Despite Strupp’s foresight, it has taken the field of psychotherapy research nearly half a century to recognize the wisdom of his statement. Prior to the turn of the 21st century, the success of psychotherapy outcome typically was attributed to three factors in the research literature: patient variables, techniques, and common factors (i.e., those that are germane across all theoretical approaches, such as the working alliance and Rogers’s necessary and sufficient conditions). Research on the personal (i.e., nontherapy specific) qualities of the therapist, when it was present at all, was devoted primarily to superficial variables such as the sex or age of the therapist. Not surprisingly, these variables, whose influence on the process of psychotherapy is fairly removed, did not account for much variability in psychotherapy outcome, thereby furthering the belief that factors related to the person of the therapist are relatively unimportant in determining therapeutic success. To our way of thinking,
the therapist’s vulnerabilities and unresolved conflicts constitute personal qualities that exact greater influence on the process of therapy than more distal variables such as the therapist’s sex and age.
