Philosophy:

The philosophical layer is the more abstract plane of any practice. It addresses the notions of reality, knowledge production, and ethics. We all have some assumptions about these three areas, but it is quite helpful to make them explicit and to see if there are like-minded people in the field.

Our philosophical assumptions may be changing over time, or become more nuanced and deep. I have grouped some main views in the field in:

• Phenomenological: focus on personal experience, direct referents, perception.
• Hermeneutic: focus on interpretation, symbols, horizon of meaning.
• Cybernetic: focuses on processes and patterns, social systems, biological systems, and mind systems.
• Scientific: Focus on trials (isolated experimentation) and statistics, evidence-based, and cumulatively true.
• Spiritual: a trust in the goodness and natural unfolding of entities.
• Constructive: Focus on reality construction and unique realities.
• Participatory: focus on assemblage with the world, abstract/practical, unique/real experience.

These groups have many representatives, and each has its own flavour. I think they are distinctive and connected to some of the major movements in psychotherapy. Scientific is directly connected with CBT, phenomenological with Person-Centred, Hermeneutic with Psychoanalysis, and Spiritual with Humanistic approaches (some may criticise the use of spiritual; maybe humanistic would be best, but from there emerged the transpersonal group). The concepts do not fully represent an author or an approach. Each author may have a bit of this and a bit of that. For instance Lacan or Bion have a flavour of cybernetic thinking, Winnicott a flavour of Spiritual/Humanistic, Rogers a flavour of Scientific at the beginning. Jung, being quite Hermeneutic, is considered a Spiritual author. With these groups I am not trying to define something, but to point towards flavours in psychotherapy and theory in general. We can see how newer authors will adhere more to a Constructive or Participatory option, the first believing in a fully independent reality for each, and the second keeping a notion of reality, that is uniquely assembled in each individual.