Toward a renewal of personology in psychotherapy research.

The articles by Elkins (D. N. Elkins, 2012, Toward a common focus in psychotherapy research, Psychotherapy, 49, pp. 450-454) and Hayes (S. C. Hayes, 2012, Humanistic psychology and contextual behavioral perspectives, Psychotherapy, 49, pp. 455-460) serve as a springboard for a call for a renewal of personological methods in studies of the psychotherapeutic relationship-methods that can investigate the emotional worlds of patient and psychotherapist as well as the relational systems constituted by the interplay between them. I believe only such idiographic research can illuminate the nexus of humanistic elements in which the psychotherapeutic process takes form. The beginnings of the author's own phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective hark back to a series of personological studies of the subjective origins of psychoanalytic theories.