In Praise of Simplicity: Commentary on Ablon and Jones

Stuart Ablon and his mentor, the late Enrico Jones, have made a major contribution to psychotherapy research in pioneering a standardized coding system for therapeutic interaction that has enabled workers to extract from the almost infinite complexity of the interpersonal interchange between therapist and patient those indicators which are most likely to be theory-driven and to relate to therapeutic outcome.

The Q-set instrument they have devised offers a particular level of analysis for exploring the process of psychological therapy. The Psychotherapy Process Q-set (PQS) represents a specific setting on the psychotherapy researcher's microscope that brings into relief particular features of the therapeutic process while necessarily blurring others. No valid and reliable measurement approach in psychotherapy research is capable of keeping all levels of analysis of a treatment in focus simultaneously. The clinician's belief that this is desirable and may be possible through active participation of the observer in the therapeutic process is an illusion, and a somewhat self-serving one at that. As participants, either as patients or as analysts, our focus rapidly shifts between different levels of analysis. At one moment we choose to focus on microanalytic aspects of the interchange, at another overarching thematic features that may define an entire analytic treatment. In clinical reports our focus may be sentences exchanged that hint at transference themes or at life experiences brought from outside the session. As clinicians we allow our minds to scan the entire scene, our eyes moving from features close to us to other features almost merging with the distant horizon. Yet just like the person scanning a landscape we experience everything as in focus at the same time. When we try to