Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does the Therapeutic Relationship Contribute to Change?
Connect goals, tasks and bonds to a concrete disagreement about therapy.
Why you’re reading it. Give the later studies a clearly defined claim to investigate.
A question to consider. A client trusts the therapist but sees no point in a proposed activity: which parts of the alliance are implicated, and what would you need to ask before interpreting the disagreement?
Why this reading
Bordin makes collaboration a question about the work of therapy as well as the relationship between its participants. His account gives readers a vocabulary for comparing therapies without assuming that a friendly bond is the whole alliance.
Before you read
An alliance is a working partnership. Distinguish the desired change, the activities intended to produce it, and the bond that supports collaboration. A conceptual framework can generate hypotheses before it has a validated measure.
Read for
- Examine the four propositions and how the examples connect goals, tasks and bonds.
- Identify where an argument about fit becomes a prediction about effectiveness.
Consider afterwards
- Describe a warm relationship in which the participants disagree about what they are trying to achieve.
- What observation would challenge the claim that alliance strength is the main determinant of change?
Editorial context
This theoretical essay proposes a research programme; it does not experimentally establish the causal primacy of alliance. Its characterizations of therapy schools and diagnostic language reflect its period. The framework helps formulate comparisons, while the strength and generality of its predictions require evidence.