On the epistemic autonomy of the science of psychotherapy

A plea for an ethics of reflexive experience

Abstract

The increasing academization of psychotherapy raises fundamental questions about its scientific positioning and ethical foundations. In particular, trends toward standardization, homogenization, and psychologization threaten to marginalize those dimensions that are constitutive of psychotherapeutic practice: subjective experience, processuality, ambiguity, and the irreducible nature of human suffering. his article argues that psychotherapy follows its own epistemic logic, one that cannot be subsumed under explanatory or technicist models of science. Against this backdrop, the article makes a case for an ethics of reflexive experience as a central prerequisite for the epistemic autonomy of the science of psychotherapy. Knowledge is not understood here as a primary entity, but rather as a derived category that is legitimized only through its engagement with reflexively explored experience, relationships, and time. Training therapy and supervision are identified as central spaces of experience in which this ethical stance is developed and safeguarded against epistemic hubris. This text is intended as a contribution to the self-understanding of the science of psychotherapy and as a counterpoint to standardizing tendencies in current scientific discourse.