Psychotherapy as a relationship between subjects and the role of treatment protocols

Abstract

The EST approach is an extension to psychotherapy of the methodology used in drug research (Evidence-Based Medicine) and promotes the use of specific techniques and treatment protocols. The Common Factors indicate the validity of multiple psychotherapies, which would be based on dimensions common to all treatment, and not so much on the use of specific techniques. The medical and pharmacological procedure fits reasonably within a framework of instrumental action, in which the medical act is exercised in order to modify certain biologicals parameters. But psychotherapy is better understood as a relationship between subjects, since the patient, is not a parameter. For this reason, protocols as predetermined sequences of actions by the therapist, could imply a kind of elimination of the subject. It is therefore necessary to understand the meaning of the treatment protocols not as a script of action but as frameworks of meaning, of pertinent problems, of indicated solutions. As a form of flexible knowledge about the problem and its functioning and management.