ABSTRACT
This chapter presents narratives of psychotherapy: the role of therapist, client, and change, ordered by stages of ego development. Its purpose is to open further inquiry into the relationship between ego development and conceptions of psychotherapy. In the context of contemporary philosophical considerations of subjectivity, the chapter reviews and summarizes some findings from an exploratory study to investigate the relationship between adults’ ego development and their representations of psychotherapy. One hundred and fifteen subjects, 64 from student settings and 51 from patient settings, completed the Washington University Sentence Completion Test (WUSCT; Loevinger & Wessler, 1970) and the Reasoning About Psychotherapy (RAP) questionnaire constructed for the present study. Results suggested a positive relationship between ego development and conceptions of psychotherapy for the patient group after education was partialed out. Results were similar, but not as consistent, for the student group. These results, suggestive of the importance of ego development for clinical effectiveness, are used as a backdrop to a qualitative presentation of the subjects’ representations of psychotherapy.
