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The questions that psychotherapy research is eager to address are not the questions in which psychotherapists are interested. Psychotherapy research focuses on general theories, while the psychotherapist is concerned with a particular patient and the stories that individual tells or enacts. Psychotherapy research does not clarify what inferences may validly be drawn from specific clinical "data." There is a lack of criteria for determining what counts as observation and how the observations would best be reported. The criteria should answer to psychotherapists' interests, but not exclude data which contradict their preferred ideas. Nor should the observations accepted be infected by the questions or ideas to be tested.
The psychotherapy researcher depends on quantification to establish reliability, while the psychotherapist pursues the particular. The relationships between these particulars lead to a theme and to a story—stories told and enacted. The patient tells the stories (ordered sequences of events, with a trigger event and final sequence). The stories have a specific purpose: to solve a problem. The knowledge on which the therapist depends is the knowledge of the narrative. The therapist retells the story to the patient so that the patient recognizes it as his or her own (interpretation). Working well through metaphoric reasoning rather than logic, the therapist seeks not prediction, as does the clinical investigator, but understanding of variables and their interrelatedness. The psychotherapist holds the theory that there exists a master story which causes the observed clinical data, the stories, the enactments, etc., of the patient. The master story disposes the patient to respond to certain kinds of events in a certain way. The patient has a wish to actualize this story and searches unconsciously through the environment for the needed elements with which to do so. The process entails suffering and entrapment.
The complexity of the patient's s