Book Launch: Persuasion and Healing (Updated Edition)
Bruce Wampold, in conversation

An Event with Bruce Wampold: Persuasion, Healing, and the Future of Psychotherapy

For over sixty years, Jerome Frank's Persuasion and Healing has illuminated the essential mechanisms that make psychotherapy effective across all its forms. Now, in a thoroughly updated edition, Bruce Wampold joins Julia B. Frank in extending this groundbreaking work into the 21st century, offering profound insights for a field grappling with questions of evidence, effectiveness, and the nature of therapeutic change itself.

Bruce Wampold has spent three decades challenging our most fundamental assumptions about how psychotherapy works. His research reveals a startling finding: when properly delivered, all bona fide psychotherapies demonstrate roughly equivalent effectiveness. This "zero percent difference" isn't a limitation—it's a revelation about what truly matters in therapeutic work. Through his contextual model, Wampold demonstrates that the common factors uniting effective therapy—the therapeutic relationship, a coherent treatment rationale, and the therapist's skill in creating hope and expectation for change—matter far more than the specific techniques that distinguish one approach from another.

The new edition of Persuasion and Healing extends Frank's original insights to encompass contemporary forms of therapy, from narrative and cognitive-behavioral approaches to digital interventions and the deployment of lay mental health workers in under-resourced communities. The book examines psychological healing as both a scientific and cultural phenomenon, recognizing that professional psychotherapy exists on a continuum with faith healing, indigenous practices, and the fundamental human capacity for healing through relationship.

What makes Wampold's contribution particularly vital is his integration of rigorous empirical research with a deeply humanistic understanding of therapeutic process. His work reveals that effective therapists share specific, measurable qualities: the ability to form working alliances with difficult patients, verbal fluency in explaining treatment rationales, emotional attunement even when patients hide their feelings, and the flexibility to adapt their approach while maintaining coherence. Most provocatively, his research shows that therapists don't automatically improve with experience—a finding that challenges us all to engage in deliberate practice and continuous professional development.

In an era of manualized treatments and evidence-based protocols, Wampold's work offers both validation and challenge. Yes, psychotherapy is remarkably effective—as effective as medication and with longer-lasting results. But this effectiveness depends less on following specific protocols than on the therapist's ability to create a compelling, culturally resonant explanation for suffering and a believable path toward healing. This isn't anti-scientific; it's a more sophisticated science that recognizes the irreducibly social and relational nature of human psychological change.

Join us for an evening of conversation with Bruce Wampold as we explore:

• How can the contextual model transform our understanding of what makes therapy effective?

• What does the "zero percent difference" between therapies mean for clinical practice and training?

• How do we cultivate the specific skills that characterize highly effective therapists?

• What role should outcome measurement play in everyday clinical work?

• How can psychotherapy maintain its humanistic core while meeting demands for evidence and accountability?

• What does the future hold for psychotherapy in an age of digital interventions and AI?

• How do we bridge the gap between research findings and the lived reality of clinical practice?

An evening for clinicians, researchers, and all who seek to understand the art and science of psychological healing.

Bruce E. Wampold Ph.D., ABPP, who received his PhD in counseling psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, is Emeritus Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and is Chief-Scientist and a founder of Skillsetter.com, an electronic platform for the deliberate practice of interpersonal skills. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is Board Certified in Counseling Psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology, and is the recipient of the 2007 Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2015 Distinguished Research Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and the 2019 Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Application of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation. He has proposed a Contextual Model of Psychotherapy, which is summarized in The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence forWhat Makes Psychotherapy Work.