WCP 2025

This presentation introduces the concept of epistemic trust—the fundamental human capacity enabling us to learn from others who are trustworthy and collectively establish shared beliefs and ideas, which we recognize as ‘culture’. The talk will highlight emerging evidence underscoring the critical role of epistemic trust in social learning and examine research demonstrating its vulnerability to adversity, particularly during childhood. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the extensive developmental and adult-life consequences resulting from disruptions in epistemic trust. Further, exploring the link between epistemic trust and mental disorders sheds light on one of the key mechanisms mediating trauma's lasting impact, notably in the onset of mental health difficulties and impairments in personality functioning. We will discuss therapeutic approaches aimed at addressing epistemic mistrust and epistemic hypervigilance, alongside recent findings on how mistrust disrupts human social communication systems.

Statement of the problem: Modular and common factor approaches in psychotherapy are a central issue in psychotherapy research. It seems necessary to mark the limitations of specific approaches and to detect where interdisciplinary perspectives are indispensable. This presentation is an attempt to integrate psychotherapeutic models as well as neurobiological, psychological and socio-cultural and practical aspects of psychotherapy.
We offer a comprehensive psychotherapeutic model which integrates relational, cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic-psychoanalytic and existential aspects. In this process neuro-biological, psychologic and socio-cultural perspectives come into play.
Methodology & theoretical orientation: The case of a patient suffering from schizotypic episodes is studied under the perspectives of relational, cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic-psychoanalytic and existential psychotherapy. In a hermeneutic circle biological, psychological and socio-cultural findings are integrated.
Findings: It is shown that psychotherapy can and should include psychological, cultural and neurobiological knowledge. The dialectics between coherence–incoherence, stabilization–destabilization, construction–deconstruction of cognitions, emotions, and actions are shown to be general principles that can be found in neuroscientific, psychological and cultural approaches in psychotherapy.
Conclusions: The interdisciplinary reflection of different psychotherapeutic methods leads to a practical model that can integrate relational, cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic-psychoanalytic and existential aspects of psychotherapy.