Jürgen Kriz

Kriz studied psychology, philosophy and social pedagogy as well as astronomy and astrophysics at the universities of Hamburg, Germany, and Vienna, Austria, where he obtained his doctorate in 1969 with a dissertation about 'Subjective Probability and Decision Theory'.

[1] After working as scholar and research assistant at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Vienna, Austria, he was an associate professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

From 1974 to 1999, Kriz was full professor for research methods, statistics and philosophy of science at the Faculty of Sociology of the Osnabrück University, Germany.

His work focuses on statistics and research methodology with particular emphasis on criticism of science as well as the development of a comprehensive approach called person-centered systems theory.

Kriz argues that psychotherapy research usually neither does justice to the fact of non-linear courses in development and change processes nor does it take the human being as subject into account.

The conditions for research would not only be determined by manualized[5] effects or interventions, but also to a large extent by the patients' subjective attributions of meaning as well as their interpretations.

In addition to this fundamental misalignment of RCT research in psychotherapy, Kriz has criticized numerous other problems due to questionable – mostly undiscussed – assumptions.

After more formal works such as Chaos und Struktur (chaos and structure, 1992) or Systemtheorie für Psychotherapeuten, Psychologen und Mediziner (systems theory for psychotherapists, psychologists and physicians, 1999), Kriz has in recent years mostly refrained from explicit formal derivations of the fundamentals in order to address a larger circle of readers.