The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) schizophrenia guideline (2009) recommends that healthcare professionals may consider using psychoanalytic and psychodynamic principles to help them understand patients’ experiences and interpersonal relationships. This is the first of a brief series of articles considering how NICE’s recommendation might be put into practice, outl...

The American Psychological Association Report of the Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice delineates Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology (EBPP). The model provides a broad-based framework that allows for the placement of psychotherapy case study outcomes in a systematic, evidence-based context, complementing the results of group-based efficacy studies. This Commentary introduces...

UNLABELLED This is the first study to explore the relationship between aspects of a therapists' personal therapy and the subsequent psychotherapy process and outcome they perform. The participants were 14 graduate clinicians with various experiences in personal therapy, who treated 54 outpatients engaged in short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy at a university-based community clinic. Results d...

Reviews of currently empirically supported treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show that despite their efficacy for many patients, these treatments have high nonresponse and dropout rates. This article develops arguments for the value of psychodynamic approaches for PTSD, based on a review of the empirical psychopathology and treatment literature. Psychodynamic approaches may h...

Due to imprecise methods of evaluating therapist behaviors, little progress has been made in demonstrating how the therapist contributes to the success of psychotherapy. More important, the suitability of the therapist's behavior to the particular needs of a given patient has not been adequately assessed. In this article, we describe a new approach for assessing the suitability of therapist int...

High patient drop-out rates have traditionally interfered with both treatment and study of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). The authors tested hypotheses that an adequate treatment contract, a positive therapeutic alliance, and the severity of illness would all correlate with continuation of treatment versus drop-out in a BPD cohort receiving psychodynamic psychotherapy. The...

OBJECTIVE This study examined 1) whether patients with chronic and recurrent anxiety and depressive disorders and/or personality disorders demonstrate improvement in their defense styles with long-term dynamic psychotherapy and 2) what the relationship is between defense style change and symptomatic change. METHOD Measures of defense (Defense Style Questionnaire) and symptoms and functioning ...

Various psychodynamic processes may underlie the development of psychogenic pain disorder such as conversion, the displacement of affect, or narcissistic defenses. However, many of the processes suggested are related to a disorder of affect regulation. The term affect regulation in psychoanalytic literature refers to phenomena which are often described by the concept of alexithymia. Empirical o...

Ablon JS, Jones EE: How expert clinicians’ prototypes of an ideal treatment correlate with outcome in psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Psychotherapy Research 1998; 8:71–83 Summary: A panel of internationally known experts in psychodynamic (PD) and cognitive-behavioral (CB) therapy used the Psychotherapy Process Q-set (PQS) to produce prototypes of an ideal treatment in each of th...

INTRODUCTION Therapeutic alliance is a key component of the psychotherapeutic process. This study estimated the impact of the therapeutic alliance as measured by CALPAS-P in an individual brief psychodynamic psychotherapy program. METHODS To study the impact of the therapeutic alliance patients in psychotherapy answered to the CALPAS-P at the first and third session and to the Self-report Que...