As a psychotherapy groupie, I’ve always enjoyed the essays of Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of "Going Sane: Maps of Happiness." His earlier work: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; Essays on the Unexamined Life" is worth a read. This piece appeared on Sunday’s OpEd page. needless to say, it caught my eye.   

PSYCHOTHERAPY is having yet another identity crisis. It has manifested
itself in two recent trends in the profession in America: the first
involves trying to make therapy into more of a "hard science" by
putting a new emphasis on measurable factors; the other is a growing
belief among therapists that the standard practice of using talk
therapy to discover traumas in a patient’s past is not only unnecessary
but can be injurious.

That psychotherapists of various
orientations find themselves under pressure to prove to themselves and
to society that they are doing a hard-core science