Although examination of our personal beliefs about human nature as well as psychotherapeutic practice is important. Dr. Mahrer's argument that the fieldlacks foundational beliefs was based on a few erroneous assumptions about the nature of the field of psychotherapy and a misleading parallelism between natural science and therapeutic science. Complete agreement about foundational beliefs is not desirable or even necessary for the field of psychotherapy because the nature of the enterprise of psychotherapy is always pluralistic. A common mistake made in criticizing the field of psychotherapy as a flawed science comes from the presumption of positivist science as an ideal model for any scientific inquiry.
