ABSTRACT
Rycroft was one of the first psychotherapists to point out that an understanding of the difference between the meaning of something and the cause of something was essential to an understanding of the effects of psychotherapy (Rycroft, 1966). Philosophy has been much preoccupied by the different implications of these two kinds of explanation (Puttnam, 1973), but whilst there has been a considerable discussion within medicine about what constitutes evidence of cause, there has been much less about what constitutes evidence of meaning (Grünbaum, 1990).
