These are terrfic statements, Jessica, and, I think, validated not only by Weiss and company's empirical data but by lots of other less formal evidence, too. An important point, for me, is that the theory applies most clearly to persons who are seeking help from a therapist. The theory applies less clearly in other situations. That is, it may be a mistake to asume that people begin all interpersonal encounters, including encounters other than those with a therapist, for the sake of disconfirming their pathogenic beliefs. It may be true that this is what people do outside of therapy, but it is less clearly plausible. I wonder about persons, for example, who are deeply indentified with an aggressor from childhood, and who seem to feel compelled to engage in destructive passive-to-active tests with, perhaps, the whole world. It is not clear to me, for exmple, whether a terrorist kills people in order to enact a passive-to-active testing of his victims or whether he has abandoned hope of ever being able to overcome an identification with the aggressor. In short, despair seems possible, and despair may be so complete that one's passive-to-active enactments become so hard for others to bear that there can be really no chance of anyone's passing these passive-to-active tests. And here comes the bigger problem: <<If such doubts about the applicability of CMT to terrorist behavior exist, we then have a problem of knowing how to draw a demarcation line for the applicability of CMT's assumptions to other situations outside of a therapy session sought voluntarily.>> We don't know exactly where or even how to draw that line. So I have no problem with the applicability of CMT to the therapy encounter with a patient who enters therapy more or less volunatarily. (Court cases of mandated therapy may be problematic for CMT assumptions, too.) Thus I am left wondering about the applicability of CMT assumptions to encounters outside of theapy where often the assumptions would seem to apply but sometimes perhaps not. The key principle of demarcation would seem to be one's level of despair. If one believes despair is possible, an implication of that belief is that one despair means giving up trying to surmount pathogenic beliefs. And then what happens next? And so it is not clear where the dividiing line of applicability is or if there even is one. But if there is no place where CMT's assumptions do not fit, then we have another problem. The theory ends up trying to explain all behavior. This is not a problem unique to CMT, however, since every theroy of therapy ends up trying to explain more than it can. The incompletness theorem teaches us that when a theory tries to explain everything about the domain of phenomena it tries to account for, then the theory becomes self-contradictory. So it is only a sign of a coherent theory that there be human behaviors and motives that CMT does not explain. These, I think are surely situations outside of voluntarily sought therapy where CMT assumptions are inapplicable. I think that is where we also find despair, and CMT is actually made safe from risk of self-contradiction by its not being able to explain situations of despair that occur outside of voluntarily sought therapy. When and how these situations of despair arise and what, if anything, can be done about them, is not the professional concern of a theapist who works with pateints who seek therapy volunatrily. Of course it may be a human concern or the concern of a therapist as responsible citizen. How often and under what conditions despair is expressed and with what kinds of consequences are all matters that should be left to another theory in order for CMT not to become self-contradictory. In the situation in which therapy is sought voluntarily, CMT is, in my opinion, the most coherent, most comprehensive, and most effective discovery in the history of psychotherapy. It is the best that psychotheapy has to offer.
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