Epistemic Trust in Psychotherapy: The First Decade

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Humans are prolific communicators – our impulse to exchange information, to chat, argue, teach and learn, convince and console is one of the most conspicuous outcomes of the cognitive revolution that took place sometime between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, and the ongoing conversation hasn’t stopped since.  Most broadly, the communicative impulse is the backbone of culture and the transmission of culture. The theory of epistemic trust – as applied to developmental psychopathology – also argues that vulnerability to psychic distress and mental health disorder is the price we pay for this social cognitive sophistication, for as soon as we can communicate information, the possibility of misinformation arises. Further, in order to communicate effectively we need to be able to mentalize the other – but mentalizing is an imaginative capacity, and imagination can run wild. Excessive mistrust, excessive credulity, and failures to understand communicative intent and imaginative excess can all distort our capacity to join the human conversation, and the theory of epistemic trust argues that these processes constitute one way of understanding psychological disorder, and the task of psychological treatment.

This UCL conference, featuring leading thinkers in the area, will consider the role of epistemic trust in understanding the relationship between culture, communication and psychopathology in the human condition.

Image credit: Griffith University, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons