Can Neuroscience Help to Make Psychotherapy More Acceptable?

In the last few years, there has been a flurry of publications about neuroscientific topics that overlap with topics of interest to psychotherapists, and even some that purport to explain psychotherapy in neuroscientific terms. I meet quite a lot of colleagues who have great hopes of this development. The hopes seem to be not so much that therapists might learn how to do better therapy, but about how psychotherapy is seen by the general public and perhaps especially by the medical profession. We appear to be hoping that the neuroscience will make us more acceptable, more respectable.

As far as I can see, there are two specific aims that we might hope for. Either neuroscience might show that psychotherapy ‘works’ - that is, show measurable, structural, visible, graphic changes in people's nervous systems following therapy. Or it might elucidate mechanisms by which psychotherapy works - this would strengthen its plausibility and thereby the case for its efficacy. Quite probably, the hope is that neuroscience will show both that psychotherapy works and how it works.

I assume that behind these hopes must be a belief that we are not respected and accepted; that the general public and especially the medical profession do not recognize psychotherapy as a valid approach to human suffering; that our work is not seen as useful.

When I come across issues around acceptability, I get a bit suspicious. I tend to imagine a client who tells me that they feel marginalized and on the edge of an in-crowd, and that what they do is seen as worthless. Trying to help this client to find the magic words that will make their work accepted by others is a possible intervention, but it would not be my first choice by a