This paper focuses on the relationship between depressive disorders, personality configurations, and mental functioning. A one-year treatment of a young man with the diagnosis of Depression is presented: the clinical and empirical points of view are described in depth through an assessment at the beginning and at one year after of an oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy. SCID I and II and HAMRS...

BACKGROUND Evidence has shown that psychotherapy is effective for depression, whereas the outcome for suicide risk is unclear. AIM It was to investigate whether possible pre-treatment predictors of suicide risk (SR) decrease after a brief psychodynamic psychotherapy treatment and at follow-up. PATIENTS AND METHODS Forty-one patients were assessed at: baseline (T0) for clinical history, clin...

The following case study is presented to facilitate an understanding of how the attachment information evident from Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) assessment can be integrated into a psychodynamic perspective in making therapeutic recommendations that integrate an attachment perspective. The Adult Attachment Projective Picture System (AAP) is a valid representational measure o...

BACKGROUND In psychodynamic psychotherapy, one of the therapists' techniques is to intervene on and encourage exploration of the patients' relationships with other people. The impact of these interventions and the response from the patient are probably dependent on certain characteristics of the context in which the interventions are given and the interventions themselves. To identify and analy...

BACKGROUND A few recent studies have found indications of the effectiveness of inpatient psychotherapy for depression, usually of an extended duration. However, there is a lack of controlled studies in this area and to date no study of adequate quality on brief psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression during short inpatient stay exists. The present article describes the protocol of a study th...

The effects of psychotherapies for depression have been examined in several hundreds randomized trials, but no recent network meta-analysis (NMA) has integrated the results these studies. We conducted an NMA trials comparing cognitive behavioural, interpersonal, psychodynamic, problem-solving, behavioural activation, life-review and “third wave” therapies non-directive supportive counseling wit...

From the 80s onwards, new psychotherapeutic interventions were developed to achieve profound changes to the character pathology of the most serious cases with Personality Disorders, utilizing the existing psychiatric settings (inpatient wards or day hospitals). The latter were taken as the necessary framework (or containing, in psychoanalytic terminology) parameter for dealing with the enactmen...

The concept of transference and the use of transference interpretations in psychotherapy have been highly controversial topics garnering frequent attention both within psychoanalysis and across multiple orientations of psychotherapy. In this article, we review the empirical evidence as it bears on this controversy and discuss the implications of the evidence for psychoanalysis, psychodynamic ps...

In psychotherapy, therapists often formulate interpretations of clients' prior talk which are ‘unilateral’ in the sense that index they themselves author an interpretive inference may not be acceptable to client. Based on 100 German-language recordings brief psychodynamic psychotherapy (4 clients with 25 sessions each), we describe a multimodal practice constructing extended multi-unit turns de...

In this paper, we present a multiaxial system for psychodynamic diagnosis, which has attained wide usage in Germany in the last 10 years. First we will discuss the 4 operationalized psychodynamic diagnostics (OPD) axes: illness experience and treatment assumptions, relationships, mental conflicts, and structure, then clinical applications will be outlined. Focus psychodynamic formulations can b...