ABSTRACT
Our main criterion for deciding how far depth psychology can help in understanding people must clearly be its effectiveness in improving their adjustment. The same is true of self-psychologies such as those of Rogers and Kelly. Indeed there are thousands of reports in the literature, either describing particular cases where better adjusted behaviour or increased insight are claimed as a result of clinical treatment, or giving statistics on improvement rates for groups of mental patients, delinquents, etc. Unfortunately, though, there is a conspicuous lack of comparative, well-controlled studies to show that one kind of treatment (e.g. depth-oriented) is more effective than another. True, it is extremely difficult to define ‘improvement’ in any precise manner, let alone measure it, and difficult to secure really comparable control groups. Hence a considerable number of investigations, some of which we will summarize first, have yielded almost wholly negative results; i.e. they have failed surprisingly to substantiate the value of psychological treatment. However, we shall see later that, with a more careful analysis of the nature of the problem and its methodology, considerable progress is being made. Particularly with the influx, in the post-war period, of well-trained psychologists into the clinical field, more and more well-planned studies are being published which do show what kind of changes are induced by therapy and counselling.
