Is the therapist a scientist?

Abstract

Several unsuccessful attempts were made to respond the original question: is therapist a scientist? In this process, it seemed clear that the bottleneck was in the manner it was formulated. Given such an assumption, the original question was so rephrased: is it conceivable that a professional come to systematically produce (new) knowledge (therefore relevant to scientific community) while working as a therapist? It should be noted that it was not questioned the possibility that a therapist be also a researcher (what was taken for granted). The questions then posed was: therapist´s professional activity can meet the criteria established to characterize scientific research, assumed as: a) a question or a set of questions whose answers are important to find because they will provide us with new knowledge, theoretically and /or socially relevant; b) a set of planned steps taken in order to gather necessary information so as to reach questions raised by the research problem; c) a theoretical framework presiding the treatment and interpretation of gathered information; d) the demonstration of the degree in which the final response(s) is(are) reliable, that is, demonstration of the reasons why obtained answers, given the research context, are the best answers to be offered. From then on, an exercise was made in order to analyse and confront the activity of both the researcher and therapist, from the standpoint of: 1. the epistemological commitment and mais focus, during university years, in intervention and/or research; 2. methodological developments in behavior analysis; 3. the timing along research and clinical intervention. The product of such an exercise showed that possible answers to the main question remained unclear, ambíguos. Given analysis realized, conclusions reached point that contingencies under which therapists work are all quite unfavorable, meaning that it seems very unlikely that joint action (research and intervention) can be exerted in systematic ways. However, other elements must be considered and they kept pushing, along analysis, to another path. a) What should bond together therapists and researchers isn´t a learning curves, a jargon, not even a set of procedures, but a way of thinking and describing reciprocal relations between individual and environment. b) There exist huge gaps in available knowledge about those relations and, most certainly, several different ways of filling in those gaps. c) Focusing in the function of knowledge about behavior will depend on joint efforts of those whose main objective is to produce knowledge via research, of those who dedicates their work to intervention and, especially of those who are successful in producing knowledge while intervening in natural environments. d) Such a collective effort will be worthwhile, but it will even more worthwhile if able to overcome certain tendencies like taking methodological competence and knowledge production as professional´s option, rather than assuming these competences as epistemological commitment with psychology and ethical principles towards the client and men.