Grounded Psychology (GP)
The Scientific Foundations of Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy (GIP)
In brief
Grounded Psychology provides the epistemological, methodological and theoretical foundations of GIP.
Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy is the clinical application of Grounded Psychology.
The problem of reliable psychological understanding
Why theoretical choice is a problem
When seeking a therapist, the choice is usually presented in terms of different theoretical orientations—person-centred, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural, existential, transpersonal, gestalt, systemic, and so on.
While this is standard practice within the profession, it raises important difficulties.
From a client’s perspective, it introduces an additional layer of complexity. Beyond choosing a qualified and suitable practitioner, one is expected to choose between competing theoretical accounts of human psychology. The awkwardness lies not merely in the difficulty of making such a choice, but in the fact that the choice exists at all.
GPs, surgeons, engineers and accountants do not normally define themselves according to competing theoretical allegiances. Having a specialty is, of course, different from adhering to a particular theoretical orientation. Why, then, should psychotherapy be different?
This question is generally concealed rather than revealed, because the conventional presentation of theoretical diversity obscures what that diversity signifies: the field has not developed a sufficiently reliable and consensual understanding of human psychology. Theoretical fragmentation is therefore not merely a matter of professional choice; it reflects an unresolved epistemological problem—namely, the problem of how reliable psychological knowledge can be developed.
The deeper source of fragmentation
A principal source of this problem is sociocentrism—the tendency to understand reality, in this case human psychology, through the familiar categories and assumptions of one’s own cultural world. In Western societies, this tendency is intensified by over-intellectualisation. The resulting epistemological problem is structural and extends across the human sciences. Yet psychotherapy, like the human sciences more generally, has shown considerable inertia in addressing it. Its dominant responses have been adaptive rather than corrective.
Psychotherapy’s responses to the problem
One response has been to normalise theoretical fragmentation rather than treat it as a major scientific problem requiring resolution. Psychotherapeutic training reflects this normalisation. Future therapists are generally taught how to understand and apply existing theories, but receive far less preparation in the epistemological skills required to investigate psychological phenomena directly, develop or revise theory from empirical material, and make discriminating use of inherited concepts. The result is a posture in which theory can become doctrinal and remain insufficiently answerable to the phenomena encountered in therapy.
A second response concerns the therapist’s relationship to interpretation. In one case, clients are offered therapist interpretations intended to support their understanding of what is happening, but without a methodology specifically designed to overcome the principal sources of interpretive bias or to establish whether those interpretations genuinely fit their experience and psychological organisation. Many of my clients have described previous therapeutic experiences of this kind. In the other case, therapists seek to limit the danger of biased interpretation by relying primarily on the client’s own interpretations. This does not eliminate theoretical influence; it tends instead to make it less explicit, as the therapist’s assumptions and inherited concepts continue to shape what is noticed, reflected, emphasised or left unexplored. At the same time, this approach may limit the depth to which a detailed understanding of the client’s psychological life develops and leave insufficiently examined the client’s own assumptions, inherited ideas and other sources of bias.
From the scientific problem to GP and GIP
My position as both practitioner and researcher, with a particular concern for the epistemological foundations of the human sciences, has proved vital in responding to this impasse, because the problem is simultaneously therapeutic and epistemological. As a practitioner, I am concerned with therapeutic results and with maximising what therapy can achieve. As a researcher, I have focused on a key scientific problem which has been insufficiently addressed and has never received a fully satisfactory resolution within psychotherapy and the human sciences: how can we overcome the principal sources of distortion, including sociocentrism and over-intellectualisation, to develop an understanding of human psychology that remains grounded in experience and increasingly congruent with psychological reality?
By addressing this epistemological problem, Grounded Psychology (GP) provides the foundations of my therapeutic work. Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy (GIP) is its clinical application and differs from conventional therapeutic approaches precisely because it carries GP’s epistemological and methodological requirements into the therapeutic process. GIP preserves the therapist’s active role in the investigation of the client’s psychological life while making the overcoming of interpretive bias central to the therapeutic process. The aim is to develop a form of therapeutic inquiry that remains closely grounded in the client’s lived experience and supports the development of an understanding increasingly congruent with the psychological structures and processes organising that experience.
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The resulting therapeutic experience is therefore not one in which a pre-existing theory leads the process and the client’s experience is subsequently fitted into it. The primary engagement is with the psychological phenomena brought into therapy themselves. Theory remains secondary and is used only where relevant, after having been subjected to the epistemological and methodological requirements of GP.
My approach therefore aims to ensure that clients’ needs for understanding, clarification and sense-making are met in ways that remain closely grounded in the realities of their psychological life. From a client’s perspective, this matters greatly. The question is not only whether a therapist is caring, qualified or experienced, but whether their work is guided by a sufficiently grounded and reliable understanding of what human beings are, how psychological life is organised, and what processes are involved in difficulty, development, healing and change.
The following sections examine the sources of this epistemological problem in greater depth before presenting the methodological response developed within GP.
An overview of Grounded Psychology
Grounded Psychology is my approach to the study and understanding of human experience. It is grounded because it begins by confronting the epistemological conditions that distort our understanding of human life—above all sociocentrism and over-intellectualisation—and organises inquiry accordingly, so that understanding can remain as closely grounded in experience and as congruent with human reality as possible.
This requires more than careful observation. It involves identifying precisely which elements of our ways of thinking are culturally shaped, through the study and comparison of civilisations; discriminating between culturally shaped assumptions and those elements of everyday thought and language that remain more directly grounded in psychological experience; keeping inquiry open to all relevant dimensions of human life; refusing to let disciplinary boundaries determine what may be investigated; grounding theorisation in experience; and identifying psychological structures empirically rather than imposing them in advance.
GP also recognises that the investigator is part of the epistemological problem. The quality of psychological understanding depends not only on method, but also on the investigator’s capacity to recognise and overcome the limitations introduced by their own socialisation, assumptions and ways of being. For this reason, deep personal development forms part of the methodological requirements of GP.
The application of this approach has led to the identification of three fundamental dimensions of human life: the physical, the social-cultural and the personal. These are not separate compartments, but interrelated dimensions through which human experience, personality, development, difficulty and change become intelligible.
Psychotherapy and the disorder of the human sciences
Psychotherapy is part of the human sciences. The human sciences have sometimes been described by psychologists, social scientists, and philosophers of science as immature or pre-scientific fields. This concern has been voiced from within both psychology and the social sciences, and is reflected in the persistent theoretical instability and dispersion of these fields into multiple, often divergent, lines of understanding. It has not, however, received a satisfactory solution. Nor has it generally been made the starting point for a systematic reconstruction of psychological knowledge, understood here in the broad sense of a general, non-disciplinary science of human being.
One indication of this problem is the persistence of theoretical fragmentation. From their inception, these disciplines have been characterised by competing schools of thought and deep disagreement about basic questions. Widely diverging views offer incompatible or substantially different accounts of many aspects of human life, as well as of the more fundamental question of what a human being is.
This includes the very phenomena that bring people to therapy. There is no stable consensus concerning many of the central realities with which psychotherapy deals: anxiety, depression, trauma, personality, development, suffering, change, and the relation between personal life and social existence. Even when the same words are used, they may be understood through very different and sometimes incompatible frameworks.
The same applies to psychotherapy, where a wider theoretical and conceptual disorder has been normalised. This is why psychotherapists usually introduce themselves, not in generic terms, but according to a particular theoretical orientation, as is common throughout the human sciences. The increasingly common notion of the “integrative therapist”, which aims to draw on approaches whose principles, assumptions, and ways of working are in many cases mutually incompatible, only highlights the awkwardness of the situation.
This diversity is often presented in a positive light, as though it were a sign of intellectual vitality, creativity, or productive openness. It can also be made to appear reassuring to the public: more schools, theories, techniques, and concepts may seem to mean more resources for those seeking therapy. But this impression is misleading. A diversity of techniques can indeed be valuable, provided they are used appropriately and remain grounded in the client’s experience. The same cannot be said of unresolved theoretical and conceptual disorder. When radically different theories give incompatible accounts of the same phenomena, this is not simply a sign of richness or wider coverage. It is also a sign that the field lacks a sufficiently stable and coherent understanding of its own object.
In this respect, less can be more. A smaller number of clearer, better-grounded, and more empirically congruent concepts is preferable to an expanding accumulation of theories whose assumptions conflict with one another. The problem is not that psychotherapy has too few conceptual resources, but that many of these resources are insufficiently grounded, insufficiently examined, and mutually difficult to reconcile. What is needed is not more theoretical proliferation, but a more reliable foundation for understanding human beings and their difficulties.
My work began from dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. I did not want my understanding of human beings and their psychology to be inherited from one more school of thought within an already fragmented field. I wanted it to emerge from a diagnosis of what is going wrong in psychotherapy and the human sciences, and from the development of a methodological response to the problems identified. Two of the most fundamental problems to emerge from this inquiry were sociocentrism and over-intellectualisation.
Sociocentrism and over-intellectualisation
Sociocentrism arises when culturally specific ways of talking and thinking are treated as though they described human reality itself. In the human sciences, this can affect scientific representations as well as everyday ones: the ways in which researchers conceptualise and describe human realities are often shaped by the surrounding culture and its ideologies. Social anthropology has provided some of the clearest resources for identifying this problem.
When psychological theories are considered in their historical and cultural context, many of them appear not simply as empirically grounded descriptions of psychological reality, but as constructions shaped in important respects by the societies in which they are produced.
In the Western context, this problem is intensified by a strong tendency toward over-intellectualisation. This encourages abstract conceptual construction and formal reasoning to acquire greater authority than sustained engagement with empirical material.
These problems acquire a further significance as artificial intelligence is increasingly used by lay people and professionals alike to interpret human life and psychological experience. AI does not merely risk adding cultural bias to psychology; it can reproduce and consolidate the sociocentrism already built into contemporary psychological knowledge. Because systems such as ChatGPT learn from existing theories, professional literature, institutional discourse and culturally inherited assumptions, they largely reproduce the ways in which a society has already learned to describe and explain human experience. Where those descriptions mistake culturally specific constructions for universal psychological realities, AI can give them renewed authority and reach. The epistemological danger is therefore considerable: what is historically and culturally contingent may be presented with such fluency and coherence that it appears to be an objective account of human nature itself.
Relatively little has been done within the human sciences to overcome these mutually reinforcing sociocentric and over-intellectualising biases. One of the main reasons for this inertia is the relative weakness of practical pressures from outside the disciplines themselves. Unlike fields whose theories are continually tested through their practical consequences—such as engineering, medicine or nutrition—the human sciences can sustain inadequate theorisations for considerable periods without those inadequacies necessarily becoming immediately apparent.
Human realities are not, however, entirely insulated from such empirical pressures. Two domains have brought them into particularly direct contact with realities capable of challenging inherited theoretical frameworks: social anthropology and psychotherapy. In social anthropology, the comparative nature of the discipline — which places Western anthropologists in contact with the social and cultural realities of other civilisations — has led researchers, at least in part, to acknowledge the impact of sociocentrism on their descriptions and theories. These advances have remained limited, however. Because over-intellectualisation itself has not been properly addressed, sociocentrism has not been adequately resolved either. The case of psychotherapy is more complex.
Psychotherapy’s paradoxical response
The history of the field shows that change has occurred under the pressure of various factors. These include the persistence and growth of mental health difficulties, the increasing demand for personal development, and the limited effectiveness of earlier dominant models, especially psychoanalysis. By the middle of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis had become one of the dominant influences in clinical psychotherapy, while behaviourism exercised a major influence within academic psychology.
In different ways, both approaches remained distant from the close qualitative study of lived experience.
Psychoanalysis did pay close attention to clinical material, but it often transformed this material through speculative interpretation, treating particular narratives, symptoms, dreams, and associations as signs of hidden theoretical mechanisms.
Its concepts could then become so elastic that almost any material might be interpreted through them, rather than being allowed to correct or unsettle the theory itself.
Behaviourism, by contrast, treated scientific seriousness as if it required the exclusion of inner experience from inquiry and the reduction of psychological life to observable behaviour and experimentally defined learning processes. What was largely missing was a form of therapeutic inquiry grounded in the detailed study of experience as it is lived, described, and encountered in therapy.
It was against this background that the humanistic tradition of psychotherapy, and within it Carl Rogers’ person-centred approach, developed. Its aim was to move psychotherapy closer to people’s lived experience, and away from the speculative over-intellectualisation of psychoanalysis and the reduction of psychological life to observable behaviour in behaviourism.
A central feature of Rogers’ response was the attempt to reduce the distorting effects of therapist authority and interpretation by giving much greater priority to the client’s own experiential process and direction. The therapeutic process was no longer to depend primarily on explanation or diagnosis imposed from outside, but on the therapist’s way of being in the relationship, their positive presence and attitude, their capacity for attentive and active listening, and the conditions created for the client’s own experiencing and development.
This was a major contribution.
It helped psychotherapy move away from forms of interpretation that were often too theoretical, intrusive, or disconnected from the client’s lived experience.
It also gave unprecedented importance to the client’s own voice, to the subjective meaning of their experience, and to the quality of the therapeutic relationship itself. In doing so, person-centred counselling helped humanise psychotherapy.
It made space for forms of healing that arise when a person is listened to seriously, received without judgement, and met with acceptance, empathy, and congruence. For many clients, this has represented not a minor technical adjustment, but a deeply significant therapeutic experience: the experience of being allowed to speak, to feel, to unfold, and to be encountered as a person rather than interpreted as a case.
Rogers’ own work did not remain limited to this early formulation. Later in his career, his reflections moved more explicitly toward questions of human nature, psychological development, and the cultural assumptions shaping psychological theory. In this respect, his work began to point beyond a merely non-directive method and toward a broader and deeper understanding of human beings. His conception of the person also changed in profound ways. These later developments were not fully absorbed by the mainstream person-centred tradition, partly because Rogers’ earlier views had already crystallised into the accepted assumptions of the approach. His increasingly explicit spiritual understanding of the person, particularly in A Way of Being, was therefore often marginalised or left theoretically undeveloped.
What was largely retained, therefore, was the methodological core of the early person-centred approach: the restriction of therapist interpretation and the privileging of client self-direction. The more radical implications of Rogers’ later work were, in this sense, largely lost to the mainstream person-centred tradition.
This retained solution to over-intellectualisation presents a major flaw. In its more restrictive forms, it tends to rest on two main assumptions:
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the client is treated as the principal authority, and in practice often the only legitimate authority, on the meaning of their psychological life;
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when provided with favourable conditions for self-exploration, the client is expected to find their own way towards greater understanding and resolution.
Carl Rogers (1902-1987)
The result is that responsibility for the investigative aspect of the therapeutic process is transferred very substantially to the client. In this sense, the progress achieved by psychotherapy came at a cost. Person-centred counselling rightly sought to protect the client from intrusive interpretation, therapist authority, and the imposition of abstract theory. It also introduced a more humane, respectful, and relational understanding of therapy than had often been available before. Yet the solution it offered did not fully resolve the epistemological problem that had made therapist interpretation unreliable in the first place. Instead of reconstructing the conditions under which interpretation could become more grounded, less biased, and more faithful to the client’s experience, much of the field moved toward restricting the therapist’s interpretive and investigative role.
This restriction can be protective, and in many situations it is therapeutically valuable. But it can also frustrate the needs of clients who seek not only acceptance and emotional support, but active help in developing clearer awareness, deeper understanding, and a more reliable account of their psychological life.
Later developments within the humanistic tradition, such as Eugene Gendlin’s experiential and focusing-oriented work, continued this effort to move away from over-intellectualisation by returning attention to felt experience. From the standpoint developed here, however, these developments did not fully resolve the more fundamental issue: how the therapist may retain an active investigative and interpretive role while minimising distortion.
In practice, expecting the client to lead the investigative process adequately and successfully on their own can prove unrealistic. Person-centred methods do produce important results. These results, however, do not always meet the full range of clients’ needs and expectations. Many people struggle to make sufficiently full, deep, and reliable sense of their experiences without substantial assistance. What many of them expect is that the therapist should function as a resource enabling a significant expansion of psychological knowledge, awareness, and understanding, in the hope that this will in turn allow meaningful changes in their lives. In other words, they expect the therapist not merely to support the investigative process, but to take part in it.
There is also another problem. When therapists lack a deep and well-grounded understanding of human psychology, non-interpretive or minimally interpretive methods can allow this limitation to remain hidden. Theoretical and cultural assumptions do not thereby disappear; they may continue to influence what the therapist notices, reflects back, emphasises, neglects, or leaves unexplored, but in less explicit forms.
Radical empiricism: the methodological foundation of GP
Since Rogers’ redefinition of the therapist’s posture, psychotherapy has not, to my knowledge, produced a convincing solution that resolves the problem of interpretive bias while preserving an active interpretive role for the therapist. My work is an attempt to fill this gap.
As a therapist, I want to be able to contribute actively to the investigative process without introducing distortion and bias. I want to remain as close as possible to my clients’ experiences and psychological realities, without imposing extraneous theories, meanings, or concerns on what they bring.
To achieve this, I have addressed the problem at its source. I have worked to identify and overcome the principal epistemological conditions that distort the study and understanding of human psychology, and to organise inquiry in ways that keep theorisation continuously answerable to experience. Theory is therefore neither imposed in advance nor treated as independent of the conditions under which psychological phenomena are observed and understood. It develops through sustained engagement with empirical material and remains open to correction, revision, and reformulation.
Through years of empirical research, clinical experience, and personal development, I have worked to move beyond the limitations of existing psychological and psychotherapeutic theories and to develop a more grounded, less sociocentric, and more workable understanding of human psychology.
To carry out this work, I have embraced a form of radical empiricism based on a number of interrelated methodological requirements and personal conditions of inquiry. The most central are presented below.
The study of Western and non-Western civilisations
A deep understanding of Western civilisation, together with a working knowledge of non-Western civilisations, serves two major purposes. First, because clients’ psychological lives are shaped to a significant extent by the civilisational worlds in which they live, this comparative understanding contributes directly to a more grounded investigation and understanding of their psychology. Second, comparison makes it possible to identify and isolate ideological components, and to overcome their distorting influence on our descriptions of human psychology. These ideological components are not simply discarded. Once identified, they can themselves be treated as psychological material: as structures and representations that inform us about the psychological life of individuals and societies, rather than being unknowingly retained as conceptual instruments through which their psychology is analysed.
Discriminating what is culturally shaped from what is not in everyday thought and language
Overcoming sociocentrism also requires discriminating, within our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking, between what is culturally shaped and what arises more directly from psychological experience. Everyday language carries the ideology, assumptions and categories of the civilisation and society in which we live. But it also contains empirical notions and distinctions that arise directly from psychological life and may therefore provide valuable scientific descriptors. The task is not to reject ordinary language, but to discriminate between these different elements so that they can be used according to their proper epistemological status. Culturally inherited representations can then become objects of investigation, while empirically grounded expressions can contribute to the description and understanding of psychological reality.
Inclusive investigation
Inclusive investigation concerns the scope of inquiry. It is based on the principle that all relevant human phenomena should come under study, without selection bias resulting from disciplinary boundaries, thematic preferences, or other prior exclusions. It brings the different relevant dimensions and phenomena of human life into a shared field of inquiry, without assuming in advance how they are organised or related. It does not assume in advance that one dimension is primary, or that all dimensions must be explained through a single prior principle.
This openness is not eclecticism. It is governed by a strict empirical requirement: whatever is considered must remain answerable to experience and contribute to a more reliable and empirically congruent understanding of the whole field of human reality and of the relations that organise it.
Nor is inclusive investigation holism as a starting doctrine. It does not begin by asserting that human reality is a whole, or that all phenomena must be interpreted through a pre-existing holistic model. It begins from a methodological refusal: no relevant dimension of human experience should be excluded, artificially isolated, reduced, or assigned in advance to a particular academic or professional domain.
The holistic character of the framework developed in GP is therefore not a starting premise. It is the outcome of inclusive investigation. It emerged from the finding that human experience cannot be adequately understood when the physical, personal, and social-cultural dimensions are treated as separate domains, reduced to one another, or assigned in advance to different academic or professional domains and studied without regard to the relations that organise them.
Both aspects of my work — the methodological requirement that no relevant phenomenon be excluded in advance, and the resulting holistic framework — stand against a recurrent tendency in Western thought to isolate and atomise human reality. At the methodological level, inclusive investigation resists the premature exclusion or separation of relevant phenomena. At the theoretical level, the holistic framework that results from this investigation resists the treatment of the physical, social-cultural, and personal dimensions as separate domains that can be understood independently of one another. In both cases, the aim is to avoid partial and distorted representations of human experience, and to ensure that abstraction remains grounded in an empirical articulation of the relations that organise human life.
Inclusive investigation therefore does not mean simply widening the field of inquiry. It does not consist in adding more topics, disciplines, or types of material to an otherwise unchanged method. It means refusing to divide human reality in advance into separate domains, and seeking instead to identify the relations through which its different aspects are actually organised. In this sense, it is both anti-exclusionary and anti-reductionist: anti-exclusionary because no relevant phenomenon is ruled out beforehand, and anti-reductionist because no dimension is treated in advance as the sole explanation of the others.
Beyond providing a comprehensive and articulated understanding of human psychology, inclusive investigation also makes it possible to identify its fundamental structures and to reveal how the physical, personal, and social-cultural aspects of human life are organised and related to one another.
An undisciplined approach to inquiry
This principle concerns the status of disciplinary boundaries within inquiry. Disciplinary boundaries separating psychological, social, and historical sciences are, in my view, largely products of Western ideology and institutional organisation. They do not correspond to the structure of the phenomena themselves and should therefore not govern inquiry.
An undisciplined approach to inquiry means that human phenomena are not studied according to their traditional allocation to established scientific disciplines, but according to their place within a shared field of human reality. The advantage of this approach is twofold. First, it requires human phenomena to be investigated in relation to one another, so that the relations organising them can emerge rather than being obscured by disciplinary separation. Second, it allows the use of different methods adapted to particular phenomena where these are appropriate, while subordinating them to a single general methodological framework.
The empirical identification of psychological structures
A central part of my scientific work has consisted in identifying psychological structures from naturalistic human material. By psychological structures, I do not mean theoretical entities borrowed from established schools of thought within psychology or the social sciences. I mean recurrent phenomena, processes, and organisations of human experience identified through empirically accessible material: first-person reports, observed conduct, activities, verbal expressions, narratives, interactions, practices, objects, texts, images, institutional rules, roles, procedures, settings, spatial arrangements, and recorded events.
This method is empirical in a radical sense. It does not begin with experimental constructions, statistical abstractions, disciplinary models, or inherited conceptual grids. It begins
with sustained engagement with the phenomena of ordinary human life, approached through the epistemological and methodological requirements described above: personal experience, interpersonal situations, bodily expressions, language, cultural forms, social arrangements, historical materials, civilisational patterns, and the observable organisation of everyday existence.
The aim is to identify, across these materials, the structures that organise human life from within, rather than imposing an external conceptual order upon it.
For example, in the study of a person’s relation to their child, one may identify an oscillation between two modes of being: a role-based mode, organised around the representation of being a good mother, and a self-based mode, in which spontaneity and personal immediacy become more available. In a non-clinical context, such an observation is not treated primarily as a therapeutic formulation. It becomes one empirical instance of a more general psychological question: how human beings are organised through the relation between social role and personal existence.
This operation may be described as empirical-phenomenological structural analysis. It is empirical because it remains answerable to concrete naturalistic material. It is phenomenological because it attends to the way human realities are lived, embodied, expressed, and organised from the standpoint of human existence itself. It is structural because it does not stop at isolated observations, but seeks to identify recurrent organisations that make individual and collective phenomena intelligible. This method has allowed my research to move from concrete human material toward a general psychology without passing through the inherited theoretical divisions of the human sciences.
Grounded theorisation
Grounded theorisation concerns the conditions under which concepts and theoretical formulations are developed within GP. It is grounded not simply because theory remains answerable to empirical material, but because theorisation is conducted within the full methodological discipline of radical empiricism. This includes the identification and overcoming of sociocentric and over-intellectualising distortions, the discrimination between culturally inherited and empirically grounded concepts, inclusive and non-disciplinary inquiry, and the empirical identification of psychological structures.
Grounded theorisation also requires existing theories to be kept at a sufficient distance during inquiry and not treated as authorities or guiding frameworks. Their value can only be properly assessed once the investigator has developed an independently grounded relation to the material and can then bring the work of others into relation with their own theorisation.
Theory is therefore not treated as an autonomous intellectual construction, nor as a framework imposed in advance upon human reality. It develops within an inquiry whose epistemological conditions have themselves been subjected to scrutiny, and it remains continuously open to correction wherever greater empirical congruence can be achieved. Theoretical formulations are retained only insofar as they remain congruent with the empirical realities they seek to articulate and are kept open to revision when further inquiry requires it.
A commitment to deep personal development
In the study of human psychology, inquiry cannot remain purely intellectual, external or objectifying. It cannot focus only on others, or only on the social-cultural dimension of human psychology. It must also be personal, experiential, and reflexive, and therefore involve direct engagement with oneself.
However, ordinary experience does not necessarily provide access to all the relevant dimensions and structures of human psychology. Some of the most fundamental dimensions of human psychology — particularly the physical dimension and what I call the personal dimension, namely the part of personality that is not reducible to socialisation — do not become fully accessible through ordinary experience. They are revealed more plainly in certain experiences that are transformative, exceptional, or both, in which these dimensions become more directly accessible and can then be worked through.
Deep personal development is not separate from inquiry. It is one of its conditions and, to some extent, one of its methods. In this sense, inquiry into human psychology is both informative and transformative. The aim is to produce knowledge which, at the same time, deepens understanding and refines the very instrument through which that knowledge is generated — namely, the investigator themselves.
From academia to psychotherapy
Taken together, these principles led me to a methodological position that the institutionalised human sciences could not accommodate. The break involved was not merely intellectual. It concerned the conditions under which inquiry is allowed to proceed. To follow this path meant working outside the forms of thought, method, and institutional conformity that govern academic life. It also meant reorganising inquiry so that sustained contact with empirical reality could take precedence over inherited disciplinary and theoretical requirements.
In practice, the institutional resistance to this kind of inquiry was such that I could only continue the work independently. Leaving academia marked a turning point in my life. It was then that I decided to become a full-time psychotherapist and acquire the necessary qualifications to do so. This move brought my epistemological work into sustained contact with the realities encountered in psychotherapy and further deepened my commitment to radical empiricism.
The framework I developed
The result of these efforts has been a conceptual and descriptive framework firmly grounded in the realities of human psychology. The full results of this work will be disseminated through three successive publications in the near future. For the purposes of this website, I can only introduce a few elements of the framework.
Among these elements is the distinction between three fundamental dimensions of human life:
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the physical, which includes both the organic and the energetic
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the social-cultural
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the personal, which is not reducible to socialisation
These three dimensions are central to my understanding of psychological life. They are not separate compartments of the human being, but interrelated dimensions whose relations help make human experience, personality, development, suffering, and change intelligible.
A brief presentation of these three dimensions is provided on the page “Framework”. The framework also includes a detailed description of the developmental process corresponding to each dimension.
These distinctions and processes inform my work with clients, while being introduced in therapy only where they are relevant to the client’s experience.
What distinguishes my work from mainstream psychotherapy
Three major characteristics distinguish my work from the way mainstream psychotherapy usually proceeds.
Firstly, I have extensive experience in conducting grounded psychological investigations designed to identify and overcome the principal sources of distortion.
Secondly, because my theoretical framework is strongly empirically grounded, and because I conducted the empirical work on which it is based rather than receiving the framework from a third party, I do not relate to it as a doctrine. It remains a flexible and open structure.
Thirdly, the framework I use has been developed through sustained work on the principal biases affecting the human sciences and psychotherapy. As a result, when it is brought into therapy, the risk of distortion or betrayal of the client’s experience is more explicitly recognised, examined and worked against.
These differences affect the way theory enters the therapeutic process. Rather than beginning from an inherited framework and interpreting the client’s experience through it, I seek to investigate that experience directly, while drawing on GP only where its concepts and distinctions prove relevant and remain congruent with what is being encountered.
In practice, my position allows therapeutic inquiry to remain closely grounded in the client’s experience while drawing, where relevant, on a framework designed to deepen and extend understanding. This is what I call Grounded Investigative Psychotherapy. Its application is presented on the page “GIP”.
What this means for you
Within GIP, Grounded Psychology provides the epistemological and methodological context for exploring and understanding your psychological life more deeply and reliably. It shapes the way inquiry is conducted and understanding is developed, while also identifying and working against the kinds of bias that can distort that process. Its theoretical framework is then introduced selectively and to varying degrees according to what becomes relevant as the therapeutic process unfolds. At times, very little theory may be needed; at others, particular concepts or distinctions may help clarify how your ways of thinking, feeling and living are organised, where they may have become incongruent with the reality of your psychological life, and what possibilities for change or development may become visible as a result.
Explicit understanding plays an important orienting role within the therapeutic process. It helps you recognise and articulate more clearly what is happening in your psychological life and can guide the movements through which greater congruence develops. The deeper development, however, concerns lived understanding: the largely implicit way in which you experience, organise and inhabit your psychological life. As this lived understanding becomes increasingly congruent with your natural psychological organisation, explicit understanding becomes progressively integrated into the way your life is actually experienced and lived.
For you as a client, this means that the therapeutic process remains grounded in reality—in this case, your psychological reality and the reality of what you are experiencing. Just as an engineer must build in accordance with the ground that is actually there, psychotherapy must work in accordance with the psychological reality that is actually lived. Your experience is not made to fit the method; the method must remain answerable to your experience.