Concreteness and Specificity in Clinical Psychology

This provocative volume updates L' Abate's signature ideas, focusing in particular on the concepts of concreteness and specificity as basic tenets of evaluation and therapy. Noting society's growing familiarity with technology, current concerns about treatment accessibility, and widespread interest in wellness promotion, he argues for remote-writing exercises targeted to specific client issues and monitored by the clinician instead of relying on traditional talk-based therapy. This attention to concreteness and specificity in baseline evaluation, post-treatment evaluation, and follow-up, the author asserts, is central to making treatment replicable, less subject to impasses or missteps, and more professional, with the potential of changing how therapy is conducted as well as how clinicians are trained and practice. The book's framework includes rationales, models, empirical data, and examples of prescriptive remote-writing exercises. 

Featured in the coverage: 

• Online interventions: here to stay and to grow.
• Verifiability in clinical psychology practices.
• Present status and future perspectives for personality and family assessment.
• Practice without theory/combining theory with practice.
• Toward a unifying framework of human relationships
• PIPES: Programmed Interactive Practice Exercise and Prescriptions.

Concreteness and Specificity in Clinical Psychology will bring a new level of discussion and debate among clinical psychology practitioners and practicing psychotherapists in private practice and the public sector.

Since his retirement in 1990, Luciano L'Abate, Ph.D. has been Professor Emeritus at Georgia State University where he was previously a Professor of Psychology beginning in 1965. L'Abate has been an editorial board member of many national and foreign professional and scientific journals, as well as a consultant to various publishing houses. He is the author and co-author of over 300 papers, chapters, and book reviews in professional journals in addition to authoring/editing 34 books. His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, Spanish, French, Polish, and German languages. Dr. L'Abate is the recipient of many awards including 'Family Psychologist of the Year for 1994' by Division 43 of the American Psychological Association, 'Outstanding Contribution' by the Georgia Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and 'Outstanding Citizen' by the House of Representatives in the State of Georgia. He has also held workshops and lectured extensively in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Dr. L'Abate has spent the last several years involved full-time in writing and research since his retirement from Georgia State University.