Background: The background of this study is twofold: basic methodological differences between Western Biomedicine and Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM) and obvious parallels between the methodology of psychotherapy and CCM.
Objectives: Drawing on available investigations on the methodology of CCM, the analysis of structural parallels between CCM and Western psychotherapy tries to enrich the methodological self-conception of psychotherapy in order to provide impulses for the new approaches to psychotherapeutic practice.
Methods: The reciprocal interpretation of CCM about the patient's state draws on a language of metaphors. These metaphors "mediate" between the various positions of the universal interdependency and the human being, who is able to understand the language. The constructive realistic methodology in general and the epistemological method of "alienation" in particular, provide an instrument for the decodification of these metaphors.
Results: In the context of CCM, the process dynamics of mental healing are based on hermeneutical principals. Every operation carried out by the CCM therapist is not organ medical in nature but a purely semantic form. These semantic operations aim to provide a meaningful integration of problematical behavior (in terms of meaning) into metaphorically logical structures in order to stimulate a coherent self-understanding of the suffering individual, which is associated with healing effects. In this context, it is crucial for CCM that there is no conceptual division between body and soul with respect to the therapy. This enables a completely different comprehensive treatment of mental problems than biomedicine is able to offer, due to its methodological presuppositions.
Keywords: Classical Chinese Medicine; Constructive realism; Lingual medicine; Logopoietic hermeneutics; Traditional Chinese Medicine.