THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY IS CUT off from the findings of psychotherapy research. As a psychotherapist, I do not look to those findings for help in doing psychotherapy, or for answers to questions that come to my mind as I do psychotherapy. I do not look to those findings to settle disagreements I have with psychotherapists who apparently do psychotherapy differently from the way I do it, or to decide which of two ideas I have about what is going on in my patient's mind here and now is the better or more accurate idea.

Why should research play such a small part in this very demanding, complicated, and puzzling enterprise? I think that one reason for the difficulty of translating research findings into clinical practice follows from differences in the interests clinical researchers and clinical practitioners pursue. The questions that psychotherapy research is eager to address are not the questions in which a psychotherapist qua practitioner is most interested. The questions a psychotherapist asks as he2 is doing his work are