Flawed Thinking
The confident psychologists could well be right about their healing abilities. But Scott Lilienfeld wonders. A research psychologist at Emory University, Lilienfeld has written papers on the resistance of clinical psychologists—practitioners who treat depression, social phobia, marital troubles, personality disorders, and the whole woeful litany of human mental miseries—to evidence-based practice, in which the choice of treatment is guided by rigorous, large-scale studies. Whenever Lilienfeld advocates this, the blowback is immediate: We know what works; we see it every time a satisfied client leaves therapy cured of what troubled her....