For Adam (Adam Horvath, In Memoriam)

 

   1. I Woke up Yesterday to Find You Gone

 

There is a hole in the world where you have always been.

Your wry, lopsided smile and all your Adam-ness

Now missing, must live inside us, as memory.

 

You always stood a bit outside.

You didn’t join the latest consensus,

You didn’t just march to a different drummer,

You invented a new kind of drum.

 

You took an inventory of Bordin’s common sense

Notion of therapeutic relationship,

And made a simple measure of Working Alliance

Into a world-standard, used to this day.

 

 

2. Grandchild of the Holocaust

 

You always walked just outside the boundary,

Making your own way.

Last summer we spent several hours

Investigating the Krakow ghetto,

Retracing the steps that led to the Horror

From which your father so narrowly escaped.

Without this you would not even have existed,

The world poorer for your absence.

 

But when we said goodbye, I never imagined

I’d never see you again.

Even now I still owe you one last book chapter,

Sitting in my computer half-revised,

Waiting for me to respond to your remaining queries.

 

Although you are gone I still have

Answers to you to frame,

Not wanting to disappoint your high hopes

That I might help you unpack moments of impasse

in our shared labor of psychotherapy.

 

 

3. Oh, Adam, Adam, Adam

 

You always did what you felt was right,

Even when it -- occasionally –

Drove some of us to distraction.

 

But I was always glad to see you, knowing this:

Here is someone who truly understands

This community of those

Who seek the secrets of psychotherapy,

Not forgetting for a moment

How hard yet joyful this work is.

 

In these final years, this took you

Away from numbers and even categories,

Ever closer to the raw talk itself,

On which the whole enterprise is built.

 

 

4. Your Death Unleashes a Flood of Memories

 

You probably thought you were marginal,

A footnote, but it turns out that

You were always at the center

Of the SPR-sphere,

The web of interconnection that

Links all psychotherapy researchers.

 

Many of us are now wondering:

When did I last see Adam?

What did we say? Or do? Or eat?

 

The threads glow like nerve fibers

Trying to hold you in our minds

Before the traces go dark,

Before we go dark.

 

But you’re still there;

The memories of you still live:

Our shared laughter,

Echoing in the theater of our minds;

Your kindness, passed along

And multiplied in many acts of caring;

Your stubborn persistence, refusing to let us

Forget you and what is important in this work:

As if that was possible!

 

                                                -Robert Elliott; 20 – 23 Feb, Lodi, California

For Bernadette Walter: Brave Mama Bear

 [Note: Off and on, formally and informally, Bernadette Walter has served as the Executive Officer of the Society for Psychotherapy Research for most of the past 20 years. A couple weeks ago, during SPR's annual meeting in Krakow, Poland, we celebrated her for her long service, as she stepped down from this position for a well-deserved rest.  Two friends and colleagues, Felicitas Rost and Shigeru Iwakabe, asked me to say a few words to her during the conference banquet, and the result was the following poem. -Robert Elliott]

Like me, you first came to SPR

Wide-eyed with wonder,

Like entering an enchanted forest,

And came out changed,

Part of something larger than yourself.

 

As the decades passed,

You grew up, in and with SPR,

Met people important to you,

Made life-long connections.

 

You’ve found yourself a home here,

In this forest of intersecting

Plants, paths and people,

Among the ever-branching lines of research:

Some of them are passing fads, like ferns

That rise up for a season and are gone;

Others are more like towering redwoods

That rise up out of sight and mind.

 

But I like to imagine that your favorite SPR trees

Are most like mighty oaks,

Generously branching, filling the forest

Providing shade and shelter,

Plentiful with leaves and acorns.

 

For twenty years or more, you’ve roamed

This forest like a tutelary spirit:

Watching, protecting, keeping track

Sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially,

But always there, careful and caring,

loving the forest

And its many different creatures:

Big and small,

Shy and delicate,

Careful and heedless,

Caring and self-absorbed;

You’ve loved us all.

 

Like a mother bear,

You’ve watched over us,

Recognizing and appreciating

The wise and foolish of us,

Fierce and determined to do what is right,

To deal fairly, to meet crises, losses,

Opportunities and possibilities.

 

And as you’ve done this,

You’ve grown wise, strong and brave,

And we’ve grown, too, under your watch,

Living out our potential to use

Our knowledge and skill

To make the wider world better,

To use our many gifts to help

Those suffering in mind and spirit.

 

But now after many seasons

It’s time for you to step back,

To open the way

For a new generation of guardian bears.

 

And you’ve left the forest in good shape:

The paths are there, the scary dark places

Have been thinned and opened to the light

As it slants down through the trees;

The risks and possibilities have been mapped.

 

You have made the forest ready

For whatever comes next;

For the new bears,

Who are carrying forward

Your courage, wisdom, and love.

 

And also for all of us forest animals

You’ve protected and watched over for so long.

We are grateful and carry you

In our hearts and minds.

 

                        -Krakow, June 2025

 

Larry Beutler Passes

[Note: I heard today on the listserver of the Society for Psychotherapy Research that Larry E. Beutler died a couple of days ago.  I'm posting this little piece to mark his passing.]

 

 

This news reaches me on a gray morning,

Losing yet another of the tall trees

Of psychotherapy research.

 

For decades, Larry was deeply rooted in the heart of SPR.

He believed in and searched long and hard

For the key to psychotherapeutic change

In a set of principles that would unlock

the gnarly intersectionality of client presenting problems,

Personality and therapeutic approach.

He was unflagging in his pursuit

Of the seemingly impossible,

Unearthing enticing possibilities,

Paths that we still trace today.

 

But following the sadness and shock,

I find a smile in me as I remember Larry,

Near-constant presence in SPR,

Enthusing over his latest findings,

Loving psychotherapy research with all of his heart.

 

Not many of us now remember how in 2002

He took out a second mortgage on his house

To save the Santa Barbara SPR conference

From financial ruin.  But that was Larry.

 

Perhaps you will join me today

To raise a glass and to remember

Larry’s cheerful energy, his generosity,

And passion for sciencing psychotherapy,

Along with his cowboy boots, his leprechaun charm,

And wide, welcoming smile.

 

========

 For more about Larry Beutler (1941- 2024), see the obituary produced by his family at:  https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8xpg0tluei2t01zhodbou/Larry-Edward-Beutler-Obit.docx?rlkey=rfsd756o0xkqyy7z8kul4vs3y&dl=0 

 

In addition, an extended biography can be found in:

Machado, P. P. P., Fernández-Álvarez, H., & Clarkin, J. F. (2010). Larry E. Beutler: A matter of principles. In L. G. Castonguay, J. C. Muran, L. Angus, J. A. Hayes, N. Ladany, & T. Anderson (Eds.), Bringing psychotherapy research to life: Understanding change through the work of leading clinical researchers (pp. 319–328). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/12137-027

Vale Allen Bergin: Personal Reflections

Allen Bergin, one of the founders of the scientific field of psychotherapy research, died a couple of days ago at the age of 89. In the late 1960’s he and Hans Strupp got a grant to travel around the United States interviewing prominent psychotherapy researchers about where the field should go. The result was the book Changing Frontiers in the Science of Psychotherapy (1972), which I devoured as a grad student when I was at UCLA. I still remember the breathless excitement of their commentary on the process. It was one of the things that inspired me to become a psychotherapy researcher.

 

 

Allen had done a post-doc in the early 1960’s with Carl Rogers working on the famous Wisconsin Project, which had applied client-centered therapy (later relabelled as person-centered therapy) to work with clients with psychotic processes. With Sol Garfield, he began editing the Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change, whose first edition was published in 1971, and which was – and still remains – the standard reference for psychotherapy research.  In the early 1990’s Allen and Sol asked Les Greenberg to do a review of research on humanistic psychotherapies for the fourth edition of the Handbook.  Humanistic psychotherapies had not been covered since the first edition, so this was a big step, and a potentially an important moment for this branch of psychotherapy.  It was also the origin of the Humanistic-Experiential Psychotherapy (HEP) meta-analysis project, still continuing 30 years later. We set to work meta-analyzing pre-post effect sizes for all 37 HEP outcome studies we were able to find. (At that time, we were opposed to comparative outcome research.) Somewhat anxiously, we submitted the draft to Allen and Sol.  They knocked it back, insisting that we analyze the controlled (vs. no-treatment controls) and comparative (vs. other treatments) outcome studies.  We swallowed hard, held our noses, and analyzed the controlled and comparative outcome effects, producing the (for us) startling result of large controlled effects and null (d = 0) comparative effects.  We had obtained a no difference, “dodo bird” effect.  We submitted the revision to Allen and Sol, who knocked it back again, complaining that we had pooled comparative effects involving both CBT and psychodynamic therapies; how did we know that CBT wasn’t more effective that HEPs?  With great trepidation, we ran the comparison between CBT and HEPs; we found CBT to be slightly but nonsignificantly more effective than person-centered, but also tantalizing indications that EFT might more effective than CBT. At that point, much to our relief, Allen and Sol accepted the chapter. 

 

Years later Allen was visiting Toledo, where his son was teaching in the School of Education at the University of Toledo, and he and I arranged to meet up.  He told me that Sol had wanted to reject our humanistic therapy review chapter from the Handbook; he had insisted on keeping it in the book. Given the precarious state of these therapies in the early 1990’s, I think that the history of the humanistic-experiential therapies would be quite different today if Allen had not come our defense at that point. We owe him a debt of gratitude.

 

As another testament to his integrity, I want to point to his outspoken advocacy of bringing scientific attention to the important role of religious faith and involvement in religious communities as factors supporting mental health and psychological well-being, published in his ground-breaking paper, “Psychotherapy and religious values.,” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (1980). I remember him presenting a version of this paper at a conference of the Society for Psychotherapy Research around that time. He must have  known that it was not a popular topic with psychotherapy researchers at that point in history, and would possibly lower the estimation that many of his fellow researchers had of him. Nevertheless, it was a testament to his scientific integrity and his religious faith that he went ahead to make his case regardless of the consequences.  As another person of faith, I personally felt validated and inspired by his attempt to combine the spiritual with the scientific. 

 

Over the past 20 years, various folks in the Society for Psychotherapy Research have reached out to Allen, encouraging him to come to meetings; however, the fact is that he was happy with his mission work (he was a prominent figure in the Church of the Latter Day Saints) and with his family.  Therefore, it was heartening to read the moving account by Michael Barkham (echoed by Wolfgang Lutz and Louis Castonguay) of his recent involvement in the 7^th edition of the Handbook (published in 2021). In order to write the preface for it, Michael reports that Allen carefully read and took detailed notes on all 800 pages.

 

Right now in my imagination I’m picturing him reading the latest version of the HEP chapter in the book he and Sol Garfield founded, pleased and smiling at the nearly 300 outcome studies of HEPs now included in our reviews, feeling glad that he put his faith in us 30 years ago, just when we needed that validation.  Thank you, Allen! Your integrity and faith live on in us.  You are an important piece in the history of psychotherapy research, and one of my personal validating elders (or “angels” or “saints” if you prefer).

 

For more on Allen Bergin and his life:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Bergin

 

Lambert, M. J., Gurman, A. S., & Richards, P. S. (2010). Allen E. Bergin: Consummate scholar and charter member of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. In L. G. Castonguay, J. C. Muran, L. Angus, J. A. Hayes, N. Ladany, & T. Anderson (Eds.), Bringing psychotherapy research to life: Understanding change through the work of leading clinical researchers (pp. 101–111). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/12137-009

 

 

Remembering Leonard M. Horowitz, 1937 – 2019, Psychotherapy/Interpersonal Psychology Researcher Extraordinaire

Entry for 22 December 2019:

Len Horowitz, my friend and fellow psychotherapy researcher died on 11 November 2019, at the age of 82, in Portola Valley, California. However, my fellow psychotherapy researchers and I didn’t hear about his death until a few days ago, when George Silberschatz sent out an email on the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) list.

Personal reflections.  I met Len in 1976 when as a very green grad student I attended my very first SPR conference, in San Diego.  I have this vivid memory of hanging around with him talking by some large plants in the entryway of the Hotel del Coronado. The conference was over but I delayed leaving because I fell into long and fascinating conversation with him about how the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula could be used to increase the reliability of therapy process ratings.  It seemed like magic at the time and impressed the heck out of me.  From then on he was, to quote T.S. Eliot il miglior fabbro, “the better maker”: the psychotherapy research methodologist who I, as a psychotherapy research methodologist, looked to for inspiration.  Without him it would have been years before I discovered Spearman-Brown, and it would never have occurred to me to use to cluster analysis/multidimensional scaling for my 1985 significant events taxonomy paper.  Like many of my colleagues in SPR I was an early adopter of his wonderful Inventory of Interpersonal Problems (IIP), the items for which he constructed from transcripts of intake sessions with psychotherapy clients, a lovely example of phenomenological test construction.  His case study research on the emergence of previously warded-off mental contents, with the Mount Zion Group in San Francisco, was a revelation for me when I first read it. And so on.    

Here are a few facts about Len:  Len was born 28 Feb 1937. He received his PhD in Experimental Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1960.  He started out in Experimental Psychology, landed a job at Stanford University right out of grad school at the age of 23 (no mean feat that, even in those days), and then later did clinical training, working with the Mount Zion Group during the 1970’s, as I mentioned above.  He was president of SPR 1992-93 and president of the Society for Interpersonal Theory and Research (which he helped found) 1999-2000. He received SPR’s Distinguished Career Award in 2010.  He wrote at least two books, including an undergrad statistics textbook (Elements of Statistics for Psychology & Education,1974), and Interpersonal Foundations of Psychopathology (2004).  He is also famous for his work with Hans Strupp and Michael Lambert on a 1990’s APA task force on creating a core battery of standardized measures for evaluating the outcome of psychotherapy (published as Measuring Patient Changes in Mood, Anxiety, and Personality Disorders: Toward a Core Battery, 1997) and for editing (with Stephen Strack), the Handbook of Interpersonal Psychology: Theory, Research, Assessment, and Therapeutic Interventions (2010).  According the Scopus, his most frequently-cited publication (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991) has been cited 3758 times; it is one of the key publications in the modern attachment theory literature.

Since word of his death reached the SPR list, there has been an amazing outpouring from a wide range of well-known psychotherapy researchers honouring his many contributions.  What I have found most striking about these testimonials, however, is the portrait of Len that emerges from them: Over and over again, people have written about how Len made them feel welcome from their first SPR conference, how he was gentle, approachable, humble, enthusiastic, generous, warm, creative, throughtful and thought-provoking, wise, inspiring… and brilliant. He clearly felt a calling to support early career psychotherapy researchers and in this has provided a great service to the field and an important role model for the rest of us. I think Les Greenberg summed Len up about right when he described him as an “all round mensch”.

And here is a collection of some of my favourite Len Horowitz references (others will have other suggestions):

            Horowitz, L.M., Sampson, H., Siegelman, E.Y., Wolfson, A., & Weiss, J. (1975).  On the identification of warded off mental contents.  Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 84, 545-558.

            Horowitz, L.M. (1979).  On the cognitive structure of interpersonal problems treated in psychotherapy.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47, 5-15.

            Horowitz, L.M., Inouye, D., & Siegelman, E.Y. (1979).  On averaging judges' ratings to increase their correlation with an external criterion.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 47, 453-458.

            Horowitz, L.M., Rosenberg, S.E., Baer, B.A., Ureño, G., Villaseñor, V.S. (1988). Inventory of interpersonal problems: psychometric properties and clinical applications.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 56, 885-892.

            Horowitz, L.M., Rosenberg, S.E., Ureño, G., Kalehzan, B.M., & O'Halloran, P. (1989).  Psychodynamic formulation, consensual response method, and interpersonal problems.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57, 599-606.

            Bartholomew, K., & Horowitz, L. M. (1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 226-244.

            Horowitz, L. M., & Malle, B.F. (1993).  Fuzzy concepts in psychotherapy research.  Psychotherapy Research, 3, 131-148.

I think that an excellent way to honor Len's memory would be to go back an look at some of these wonderful papers. Just a couple of weeks ago, as part of reviewing an article submitted for publication, I was pleased to be able to recommend the 1975 study to an author. Len was truly one of a kind and certainly a major inspiration for me over the course my career as a psychotherapy researcher.

SPR Moments: A Suite of Small Scientific Poems

(On the occasion of the 48^th Annual International Conference of the Society for Psychotherapy Research)

1. Random Intercept and Slope

Each of us came here by a different route

And each of us has a different conference,

Paths winding through the program,

Highs and lows, fast and slow,

Pauses and pulses: Who can bear it all?

 2. On the SPR Presidential Address

There is the moment of meeting, the coming together

Of the different tribes, nations and languages.

Friends and competitors reconnect as we gather

For the rituals of welcome, reflection and celebration.

Some we recognize for their accomplishments or promise,

But one of us is made to put down their mark

In an unrecognized act of sacrifice:

Perhaps a tale full of twists and turns,

A labyrinthine journey, made more coherent

Than the bits of which it’s made.   Or perhaps

A bold proposal for future research,

Charting a course to tempt or inspire the rest of us,

But running the risk of crashing on the rocks. 
 

 









The truth is, all SPR presidential addresses

Are dangerous Cretan bull-jumping rituals.

We ask those we chose to grasp the branching horns

Of our most difficult research dilemmas,

And to somersault right over them, lifting us with them,

Making them bear the peril of fatal impalement.

3. Return to the Beginning

Logo for SPR 2000 Chicago

As in nature so at SPR conferences:

Researchers of like feather like to flock together,

Congregating like cranes with others of shared plumage,

Divided by the colours of our diverse theoretical orientations

Or the Darwinian beaks of our methodological bent:

Qualitative or psychodynamic; EFT or outcome monitoring.

But something in me sometimes wants to see

What I’ve been missing, what the other birds are up to,

And I pick a panel more or less at random.

The result is also random: maybe the same old story,

Or something that I find obscure or wrong-headed.

But sometimes I hit the jackpot: A useful,

Lovely new research tool or approach,

A brilliant presenter, an old friend in the audience.

This time it was an old, lost research love:

Significant events, those rare moments

Of transformational magic when something shifts.

In a panel on Saturday morning. this transported me

Forty years to the 1977 Wisconsin meeting

And a long talk with Les that changed my direction.

Now, in 2017, I realized I’d arrived

At the perfect convergence, the auspicious moment

-->

I’d been waiting for without knowing it,

My beginning looping around

Like the snake that eats its tail.

4. Last Day in Toronto

Every year we come to the same, recognizable

Reaction point at the last session of the conference:

Exhausted, elated, we try to soak up

One last inspiration to take home.

As the conference ends, two dear friends

Each part of my SPR experience from the start,

Tell me, “This is my last SPR.”

With regret they say, “It’s just too much:

Too many papers, the topics too obscure,

The young ones who talk too fast,

The banquet noisy, the travel difficult.

Wistfully shaking their heads, they say

But gently, to soften the blow:

“I don’t think I’ll be coming back again.”

I find myself fighting this, in my own way:

One, I follow after, eking out one last

SPR walk, not to dissuade, but to delay

The moment of a parting that I can hardly bear.

With the other, I arrange an oral history project,

And another friend conveys them away.

While one part of me understands and blesses them on their way,

Another part selfishly protests this parting:

“I’m not ready for you to leave”,

Like a child demanding one more story,

Or the dancers at the very end of this year’s banquet,

Chanting, “One more, one more, one more dance.”

                                            -Robert Elliott, 27 June 2017 

https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/bingeeatingrecovery/2017/03/the-healing-power-of-movement-during-binge-eating-disorder-recovery/