Heuristic Research in Psychotherapy

Heuristic Research in Psychotherapy showcases the power of heuristic enquiry to deepen through discovery, critique, create, and reimagine psychotherapy research.

Building on the interdisciplinary foundation of previous volumes in the Qualitative Research Approaches for Psychotherapy and Allied Disciplines series, this book focuses specifically on heuristic methodology--a form of research grounded in personal experience, reflexivity, and embodied insight. Across sixteen chapters, contributors explore phenomena including aesthetics, colonisation, cultural hybridity, motherhood, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and spiritual transformation. Each chapter exemplifies how lived experience and rigorous methodology intersect, offering readers a richly textured and intellectually provocative resource. Edited by Keith Tudor, the volume brings together psychotherapists, researchers, and practitioners across diverse cultural and theoretical contexts. This book challenges medicalised, positivist research models, foregrounding relational, critical, and situated approaches to therapeutic enquiry.

It will be essential reading for postgraduate students, practitioner-researchers, and psychotherapy educators seeking alternatives to conventional methods.

Keith Tudor is Professor of Psychotherapy at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Aotearoa New Zealand, where he is also a co-lead of the AUT Moana Nui Psychological Therapies Research Group. A qualified social worker and psychotherapist, he is also a Certified and Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst and a supervisor and trainer of supervisors. Keith has authored or edited over 400 peer-reviewed publications and currently co-edits the Advancing Theory in Therapy series (Routledge), and Ancestors of the Mind series (Karnac). His work blends scholarly rigour with political and clinical insight, and he is widely recognised as a leading voice in critical psychotherapy research.