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The task of comparative psychotherapy research is to clarify the relations between coexisting or competing
types of psychotherapy. Historically, somewhat sadistic-seeming practices were followed by authoritarian ones like hypnosis. In the last 80 years non-directive psychoanalytic methods have been evolved, in which success depends on the patient's self-confrontation and self-reflection. Both types of therapy are grounded in a body of clinical knowledge which is implicitly specific to persons and institutions; this is only partially manifest in psychoanalysis and is totally denied in behaviour therapy. Schools of psychotherapy are under societal pressure today to undertake the critical resolution of unreflected commitment to specific traditions of treatment, if they are to survive in changed social conditions. The traditional orientation of psychoanalysis, modelled on physiology, is currently being replaced by the more adequate model of the social sciences. A number of more flexible forms of psychoanalytic therapy have been added to classical analysis. Behaviour therapy seems also to be gradually relinquishing its claim to a monopoly of 'exact' therapy.