Metamorphosis in psychotherapy: End of the systems era

The psychotherapeutic world was once compartmentalized into a few dominant systems or schools such as psychoanalysis, behavior therapy and cognitive therapy, with little dialogue between them. The order was undermined by a proliferation of treatments, by repeated findings showing all systems to be about equally effective, and by a wave of skepticism in which leading figures of each school criticized their own system's major assumptions. This wave of self-criticism is reviewed, and current attempts to reorganize the field are described.