Many justifications can be offered for a study of psychotherapists, not the least of which is the fact that therapists seem to be rather interesting people. When the developmental psychologist Paul Bakes and his colleagues (e.g., Baltes & Smith, 1994) chose to study the nature of wisdom, they selected psychotherapists as a group they expected to exhibit it-a choice that might elicit a wry if appreciative smile in many therapists. The hallmarks of wisdom that Baltes and Smith (1994) thought might be found among psychotherapists included the following: rich factual knowledge; rich procedural knowledge; life span contextualism, or knowledge about the contexts of life and their temporal relationships; relativism, or knowledge about differences in values, goals, and priorities; and uncertainty, or knowledge about the relative indeterminacy and unpredictability of life and ways to manage it.
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