Needs, Modes, and Stances: An invited paper in CPE’s Special Issue

Together with Alexandra Klein Rafaeli (the director of Psychological Services at Ben-Gurion University and a close friend of our lab…), Eshkol contributed an article to a special issue of Clinical Psychology in Europe devoted to Transtheoretical Psychological Therapy – New Perspectives for Clinical Training and Practice focusing on integrative approaches to psychotherapy. In their article, Rafaeli and Rafaeli, 2024 argue that advances in motivational science (Dweck, 2017), personality dynamics (Lazarus & Rafaeli, 2023), and process-based psychotherapy (Hofmann & Hayes, 2019) converge into a pragmatic, integrative, and transtheoretical model of practice and training, comprising three elements: a formulation centered on clients’ psychological needs which provides guidance regarding the goals and processes most profitable to pursue; a recognition that such pursuit frequently requires contending with a multiplicity of clients’ internal self-states (i.e., modes); and an enumeration of pragmatic therapeutic stances likely to help address clients’ need-related goals in light of their modes. They distill these elements into three cardinal questions: What needs does this client have that are not currently met, and what are the most profitable ways of remedying that frustration? What mode or modes does this client manifest – both generally and at this very moment? and What stance should I adopt in response to the client’s current mode?. They further suggest that clinicians should be trained to continually pose these questions and seek to answer them collaboratively with their clients. They conclude that this model - llustrated using schema therapy terms – offers a process-based approach which serves as a theoretically integrative starting point but is general enough to provide an assimilative integration roadmap for therapists anchored in most primary orientations.

The special issue and the article itself are available through these links:

- The special issue (which includes many interesting contributions): https://doi.org/10.32872/cpe.v6.si

- Rafaeli & Rafaeli (2024): https://cpe.psychopen.eu/index.php/cpe/issue/view/511/101