Dodo Birds, a Golden Thread, and Empirically Supported Therapy

The revised edition of Jerome Frank's (1975) seminal text Persuasion and Healing: A Complete Study of Psychotherapy that I own is badly worn. It is yellowed, the pages are dog-eared, and the binding has long been broken, so much so that I keep the book in a plastic bag so that I will not lose any of the pages. I have purchased updated editions over the years; indeed I own a copy of the updated edition (Frank & Frank, 1991) that he revised with his daughter. But I preserve this original book because it opened me up to the notion of healing as an art as well as a science. A professor of mine, a rigidly trained psychoanalyst, made the book required reading because, as he said, it showed him that it was OK to speak to behaviorists.