The Common Factors
The common factors are various counseling ingredients that are hypothesized to exist across all counseling theories. The counseling relationship is one common factor that has persisted for 80 years.
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Rosenzweig's Common Factors
The common factors were first proposed by Rosenzweig (1936), who noticed that most counseling theories seemed to be effective for treating a range of mental health concerns. Rosenzweig called this observation the Dodo Bird Effect, after the dodo bird in Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland who remarked "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes". The common factors proposed by Rosenzweig were:
- Components of the therapeutic relationship
- The therapist's personality
- Catharsis
- Interpretations
- Providing clients with a way to conceptualize themselves and their mental health symptoms
Wampold's Common Factors
More recently authors such as Wampold (2001) have proposed updated lists of common factors. The common factors proposed by Wampold (2001) and summarized by Laska, Gurman, & Wampold (2014, p. 469) include:
- An emotionally charged bond between the therapist and patient
- A consistent healing setting in which therapy takes place
- A therapist who provides a psychologically derived and culturally embedded explanation for emotional distress
- An explanation that is adaptive and that is accepted by the client
- A set of procedures or rituals engaged by the patient and therapist that leads the patient to enact something that is positive, helpful, or adaptive
Bruce Wampold: What Makes Psychotherapy Work
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