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How is a reviewer who is a clinician, not a researcher, to respond to such a pugnacious tract—with its core chapters devoted to a critical examination of psychotherapy's evidence? It seems to be an expression of temerity gone wild! Perhaps, in the spirit of Oedipus' search for the cause of the plague that befell the city of Thebes, we must join William Epstein, author of The Illusion of Psychotherapy, in his journey as he attempts to debunk psychotherapy, and see if we too conclude that it is an evil chameleon that adapts to public sentiment, at best offering common-sense bromides and vulgarly hiding beneath the cloak of science.
For well over 30 years there has been a cadre of psychotherapy researchers in Berkeley/San Francisco, New York, Boston, Menninger/Kansas, and Ulm (and elsewhere) who have taken seriously Strupp's (1960) charge, “I believe that, up to the present, research contributions have had exceedingly little influence on the practical procedures of psychotherapy” (p. 63). Freud's epigrammatic offerings that neurotic misery was to be changed into everyday unhappiness and that where id was, there shall ego be have long been recognized as grievously insufficient to provide our field with veridical data. But how are the underlying patterns and structures of an activity as evanescent as psychotherapy to be captured while preserving the depth and complexity of the problem, or, in Gill's (Gill, Fink, Endicott, & Paul, 1968) words, how do we solve “the dilemma between the significant and the exact”?
With The Illusion of Psychotherapy, Epstein adds his animadversions into the ever-expanding field of psychotherapy criticism. We could agree that the talking cures have a limited range of applicability against mental disorders, and it might be argued that psychotherapy, like Thebes, is besieged by a plague, to some extent brought upon its own house by promising more than it could ever deliver. The overoptimistic burgeoning of the mental health