The clinical paradigm
The clinical paradigm helps us explore the causes that lie below the surface symptoms at the individual and organizational level.
The clinical paradigm is based on the following three premises:
1. What you see isn't necessarily what you get.
2. All human behavior, no matter how irrational it appears, has a rationale.
3. We're all products of our past.
By following the clinical paradigm we acknowledge the contributions of many other disciplines apart from psychoanalytic psychology. It helps understand personality issues, realize what certain difficulties mean, make sense of interpersonal difficulties, see through group phenomena and social defenses.
We use the clinical paradigm at different levels of intervention: the individual, the dyad, the small group and the whole organization system.