CfP: JHBS: Intersections of psychological research and psychotherapeutic practices
Submission deadline: Wednesday, 30 September 2026
This special issue seeks to contribute to the emerging historiography of psychotherapy, focusing on the “Intersections of Psychological Research and Psychotherapeutic Practices.” This topic originates from the 10th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology (University of Lübeck, 2025), which brought together scholars drawing on historical epistemology and related approaches that integrate the philosophy and history of science to analyze how knowledge and therapeutic practices concerning the psyche have been co-constructed across experimental, clinical and cultural contexts.
Within the history of the behavioral and human sciences, psychotherapy has only recently begun to take shape as a distinct object of inquiry in its own right (see, for example, the recent special issues edited by Marks, 2017, 2018; Rosner, 2018; Shamdasani, 2018; and Amouroux, Berger, Jaccard & Aronov, 2023). Earlier historical work on the psy-sciences largely focused on the production of psychological knowledge, often overlooking psychotherapeutic practices. This historical neglect may rest on the assumption that therapeutic practices are either merely applications of psychological knowledge or, conversely, that they lack scientific legitimacy and therefore fall outside the demarcation boundaries of the history of science. In contrast, social and cultural scholars have extensively analyzed the rise and popularization of psychotherapy and other forms of “therapeutic culture,” emphasizing their role in shaping modern subjectivities throughout the twentieth century (e.g., Rose, 1989, 1996; Illouz, 2007, 2008). Yet this literature approaches therapeutic practices primarily as a cultural phenomenon, rarely engaging in detail with the epistemological issues that have shaped them. As a result, much of the existing historiography of psychotherapy has been written by practitioners themselves. Such accounts typically take the form of biographies of pioneers or narratives celebrating the scientific progress of specific schools of therapy, often within a Whiggish framework.
Borrowing from Georges Canguilhem’s (1974) insight that medicine is not merely an application of biological knowledge but a therapeutic art or technique situated at the crossroads of several sciences, we propose to examine similar intersections through which different traditions of psychological research and therapeutic practice have shaped one another across diverse contexts, institutions, and epistemic styles.
Unlike the so-called natural sciences and their material instruments — microscopes, telescopes, or particle accelerators — the psy-sciences may seem to lack the equivalents of Bachelard’s phénoménotechniques. Yet, as Mitchell Ash and Thomas Sturm (2007) have pointed out, psychology relies on a rich array of paper tools — questionnaires, interviews, testing protocols — that structure both research and therapy. Different therapeutic approaches have been developed and legitimized through the use of such paper technologies as well as statistical analyses, experimental designs, clinical trials, diagnostic systems, and psychological concepts, linking clinical work and empirical research. These epistemic instruments and practices not only organize the production of knowledge and therapeutic interventions but also shape the norms and forms of subjectivity that psychotherapy brings into being. The normative effects of psy-practices have been widely discussed since Foucault’s work, for instance in the social analyses of therapeutic culture. Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson have also examined how epistemic instruments, systems of classification, and other forms of psychological knowledge and practice not only describe but also “make up people,” producing looping effects through the very categories that define them.
Finally, by examining these intertwined epistemic and normative dimensions, this special issue aims to understand the history of psychotherapy as a crossroads of reciprocal production and continual transformation among psychological knowledge, research practices, techniques of the self, social institutions, and modern forms of subjectivity.
Topics for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:
- Historiographical Methods in the History of Psychotherapy
- The Emergence of Psychotherapy Research
- Translating Psychological Research into Therapeutic Practice
- Experimental Research and Clinical Interventions
- Clinical Research on Therapeutic Change and Process
- The History of Outcome Measurement and Therapeutic Efficacy
- Clinical Trials in Psychotherapy and the Rise of Evidence-Based Practice
- The Use of Clinical Notes, Reports, Questionnaires, and Other Paper Tools in Clinical Psychology
- Historical Research on Clinical Materials and Archives of Psychotherapy
- Epistemic Dimensions of Therapeutic and Self-Help Cultures
- The Behavioral Sciences, Cognitive Sciences, and Psychotherapy
- Histories of Different Psychotherapeutic Approaches
- Psychoanalysis and Epistemic Disputes
- Training Practices and the Manualization of Psychotherapy
- The Normative Effects of Psychotherapy
- Cross-Cultural Transfers and Translations of Psychotherapy Research
- Psychotherapy as an Epistemic Practice: Knowledge, Intervention, and Reflexivity
- The Co-Production of Psychological Knowledge and Therapeutic Techniques
Guest Editors:
Submission Guideline:
Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: "Is this submission for a special issue?" by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.