ABSTRACT
A wealthy Boston matron, whom I shall call Abigail Cogsworth, had always lived in Boston and regarded Boston as the hub of her universe. One day a friend gave Abigail some advice: “Abigail, you have plenty of money and you have the time to travel. It might be nice if you traveled and saw a bit of the world.” “My dear,” Abigail replied, “Why should I travel? I’m already here!” We psychotherapy researchers sometimes resemble Abigail in our complacence: We have no need to expose ourselves to the methods or findings of other disciplines, since we are, after all, “already here.” In my view, one important function of the Society for Psychotherapy Research is to broaden ourselves with occasional excursions into other domains. In this paper, I take two excursions—one into the arts and one into cognitive psychology—in order to explore a psychological phenomenon that is relevant to psychotherapy research.
