Behaviour therapy versus psychotherapy and applied science

Recent discussions about the relation of behaviour therapy to psychotherapy and what common ground exists between them are theoretical discussions. They are disembodied from the practical problem of determining optimal treatments for every type of patient. There is a lamentable lack of familiarity with such principles of applied psychology as that the criterion of excellence of a treatment Is in the product not in the theory, that the aim of selecting a treatment is optimality not just success, and that some measures of value must enter into every decision about the selection of treatment. It appears that psychologists have fallen into the error of expecting discussions of theoretical issues to improve treatment procedures. Only discussions of the relation of explicit, operationally defined and measurable procedures to explicit, measurable behaviour improvement can have a beneficial effect on the development of methods of treatment. The exiguousness of explicit measures of treatment and of improvement, or of some other benefits, is the major shortcoming of psychotherapy. Decision theory seems to be the most appropriate model for comparing the value of different treatments.