People · Therapy101
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  1. Eras and lineages
  2. Directory
  3. Browse by era
  4. About this collection

Therapy101 / People

People in psychotherapy

Psychotherapy and counselling developed through dialogue, disagreement, clinical experiment and institutional reform. This directory holds 90 profiles of practitioners, theorists, couple and family pioneers and researchers.

Each profile separates historical context, contributions, work in the consulting room, common misreadings and critiques. Search by name, modality or book, filter by lineage or first letter. The profiles are drafts: dates, sources and clinical statements still need independent and specialist review, and each page shows its source status.

Six clinical eras and seven therapeutic lineages

Profiles are organised chronologically across six clinical eras (from late nineteenth-century depth foundations to contemporary pluralistic and somatic work) and grouped by seven primary therapeutic lineages.

Directory

Sorted by surname. The category filter uses each person’s primary lineage.

90 people

Browse by era

Eras group people by the period of their main clinical activity, ordered by landmark year within each era.

1885–1918, Depth foundations and the talking cure

Transition from neurological hypnosis to free association, transference analysis, dissociation studies, analytical psychology, and individual psychology.

1919–1945, Ego, object relations and interpersonal shifts

Expansion into child psychoanalysis, ego defence mechanisms, internal object relations, interpersonal psychiatry, psychodrama, and cultural critiques.

1946–1969, Humanistic, existential, behavioural and early family therapy

Emergence of person-centred, existential, Gestalt, and transactional therapies alongside first-wave behavioural desensitisation, attachment theory, and family systems.

1970–1989, Cognitive therapy, systemic schools and outcome research

Manualised cognitive and interpersonal therapies, Milan and solution-focused systemic practices, narrative externalising, and empirical alliance research.

1990–2009, Contextual behavioural, attachment and trauma approaches

Development of DBT, ACT, EMDR, Schema Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, relational psychoanalysis, mentalisation, and rupture-repair models.

2010–present, Pluralistic, somatic and multicultural practice

Integration of compassion-focused and sensorimotor trauma work, routine outcome feedback, pluralistic shared decision-making, and multicultural humility.

To browse by lineage and role, open Lineages and roles.

About this collection

Dates show reported birth and death years alongside a landmark publication or institutional year. Where a profile’s sources are catalogued from publisher or library records without full-text re-inspection, the page says so. See About for scope and limits and Sources for every citation.

An educational reference. It does not diagnose, recommend treatment, match people with therapists or offer crisis support.