Louis G. Castonguay

This book has broken barriers within psychotherapy and, in doing so, has expanded multiple frontiers in the broad field of mental health. For decades, psychotherapy was dominated by acrimonious debates between members of different theoretical traditions (psychoanalytic, humanistic, cognitive-behavioral). Such debates, based on an indefensible attitude of orthodoxy and complacency, created serious obstacles to the advancement of knowledge about human functioning and capacity for change. By regrouping classic texts that were written by influential leaders of diverging approaches, Goldfried's book has highlighted clear pathways of convergence and synergic complementarities between these approaches, thereby enriching our understanding of psychopathology and our capacity to facilitate clients' improvement. In addition to expanding conceptual and clinical horizons, this book has opened up new directions in psychotherapy research. Personally, Goldfried's brilliant delineation of principles of change that cut across different forms of psychotherapy not only provided me with specific directions for my dissertation, (conducted under his supervision at the S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook) but has also inspired most of the research and scholarly work that I have conducted since.