CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1590481
This article is part of the Research TopicSensing Minds: On the Role of Intuitions, Feelings, and Emotions in Psy-clinical Diagnoses and JudgementsView all articles
Intuition, Empathy, and Intellectual Humility in Psychotherapy
Provisionally accepted
- University of Padua, Padua, Italy
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Intuition is often considered a crucial tool in psychotherapy, especially in guiding the therapist's clinical strategy. However, the specifically epistemic question of how to guarantee its accuracy deserves to be better explored. Drawing on Bohart's account of intuition in psychotherapy, I will first distinguish intuition from the closely related but distinct phenomenon of empathy, and then argue that the epistemic role of intuition in psychotherapy seems to be that of a salience detector. Second, I will demonstrate why intuition must be accurate to be therapeutically effective, thereby avoiding potential related epistemic and ethical pitfalls. Finally, I will conclude by suggesting that Bohart's proposed reflective feedback loop process appears insufficient to achieve this result, and that the epistemic virtue of intellectual humility seems a prerequisite for initiating and successfully carrying out this process.
Keywords: Intuition, Empathy, Intellectual Humility, Psychotherapy, accuracy, Doctor-patient relationship, Virtue epistemology, Clinical judgment
Received: 09 Mar 2025; Accepted: 23 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Stefanello. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Eugenia Stefanello, University of Padua, Padua, Italy
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