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In this symposium, the participants attempt an earnest reappraisal of one of the more basic tools utilized by people to help other people— interpretation in treatment.
The symposium was stimulated by the various charges leveled at the utility of interpretive interventions by Nicholas Hobbs in his APA Clinical Division Presidential Address.1 Hobbs’ charges are several:
1. He points out that interpretation is perhaps the most widely used therapeutic tactic and is one aimed directly at the promotion of self-understanding. He further points out that the achievement of insight by a client is taken as an index that, armed with new understanding, this client may be gaining an increased measure of control over his life. Hobbs refers to this as the “Folklore” of helping people, and asserts, “I have come seriously to doubt the presumed relationship between the achievement of insight and more effective functioning.”
2. “The therapist does not have to be right; he mainly has to be convincing…. There are no true insights, only more or less useful ones.” Thus, Hobbs also claims that there is no correlation between more or less true insights and their relative usefulness.
3. Hobbs takes the view that the traditional formulation of the relationship between self-understanding and effective behavior “may be backwards.” He suggests that insight is not a cause of change, but a possible result of change. Insight “may or may not occur in therapy; whether it does or not is inconsequential … insight is an epiphenomenon.”
4. He sees interpretation as serving, at best, merely to chase one symptom away, only to be replaced by another.