Dr Craig French

What is psychotherapy? This is a foundational question within the philosophy of psychotherapy. I will argue that we should approach this question in a conceptually and metaphysically pluralist way. There are fundamentally different ways in which practices are psychotherapeutic, with no single ‘essence’ that unites them all. The argument for this will draw on a similar pluralism about mental health. Roughly, the argument will be that psychotherapy aims at mental health, but since mental health isn’t a single phenomenon, but fundamentally different across cases, this opens up the possibility that psychotherapy too is fundamentally different across cases depending on which mental health phenomenon it aims at. With this possibility outlined, I will then suggest that attention to the practice of psychotherapy does suggest that we should think of psychotherapy in a pluralistic way.