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Psychotherapy is partly science, but deeply cultural.

Many “new” therapies reinterpret older psychological ideas.

Therapy serves a broader social function beyond symptom reduction.

Over the past century, psychotherapy has produced what looks like an endless parade of theories. The field has moved from Freud’s couch to behavior modification, cognitive therapy, humanistic psychology, mindfulness, somatic healing, egoic states/parts-based therapies, and today’s language of trauma and nervous-system regulation.

Each new wave arrives with confidence, often promising to correct the limitations of the one before it. Yet, something curious always happens: old ideas never fully disappear.

Mindfulness echoes ancient contemplative traditions, while somatic therapies resemble older pre-modern healing systems that never separated mind from body. Attachment theory, meanwhile, revives early psychoanalytic insights about relationships and emotional bonds, now widely recognized as central to therapeutic change regardless of the modality.

Psychologist Jonathan Shedler has argued that psychotherapy often suffers from a kind of collective amnesia, repeatedly “calling a rose by another name”. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) offers a revealing example. Rather than emerging entirely separate from earlier traditions, CBT translated many enduring psychological insights into the language of cognition, measurement, and “evidence-based” science, forms of explanation that carried cultural authority in the late twentieth century.

Ironically, Shedler’s research empirically demonstrates that CBT often works best when therapists engage relationally, flexibly, and emotionally, echoing principles long emphasized in psychodynamic work. What appears,........

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