Short-term dynamic psychotherapy is a group of well-researched brief treatments with over 50 published controlled trials testing its effectiveness against a range of treatment and nontreatment controls. Studied samples are often high users of medical services, hospital services, mental health services and disability insurance. If short-term dynamic psychotherapy is effective, it should translat...

Civil litigation often has profound psychological consequences for plaintiffs and defendants alike. For those individuals who are involved in ongoing psychotherapy, or those who enter psychotherapy during litigation, the stress of litigation often adds to whatever issues produced the lawsuit. This article reviews the effects of that stress, the mechanisms through which it arises, and its manife...

This paper describes how the trend toward emphasizing evidence-based practice and empirically supported treatments is likely to affect the practice of counseling and psychotherapy in the future. Several specific predictions are described and discussed, particularly those of Nicholas Cummings. Predictions include that evidence-based practice and general psychotherapy will diverge; eventually onl...

OBJECTIVE The Ad Hoc Subcommittee for Evaluation of the Evidence Base for Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of the APA Committee on Research on Psychiatric Treatments developed the Randomized Controlled Trial Psychotherapy Quality Rating Scale (RCT-PQRS). The authors report results from application of the RCT-PQRS to 94 randomized controlled trials of psychodynamic psycho-therapy published between 19...

1Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany; 2Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Center of Neurodevelopmental Disorders (KIND), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden; 3Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M, Germany; 4Psychiatric University Clinics, Uni...

Humanism and multiculturalism are partners in an evolutionary alliance. Humanistic and multicultural psychotherapies have historically influenced each other. Humanism represents the third force in psychotherapy, while multiculturalism embodies the fourth developmental stage. Multiculturalism embraces humanistic values grounded in collective and social justice contexts. Examples of multicultural...

Psychotherapy is an activity which takes many forms and which has many aims. The present paper argues that it can be viewed as a form of moral suasion. Kant's concepts of free will and ethics are described and these are then applied to the processes and outcome of psychotherapy. It is argued that his ideas, by linking rationality, free will and ethics into a single philosophical system, offer a...

There are many forms of psychotherapies, each distinctive in its own way. From the origins of psychotherapy, it has been suggested that psychotherapy is effective through factors that are common to all therapies. In this article, I suggest that the commonalities that are at the core of psychotherapy are related to evolved human characteristics, which include (a) making sense of the world, (b) i...

How is motivational interviewing (MI) related to psychotherapy more generally? In its original formulation MI was intended to address the specific problem of ambivalence about change. It was not designed as a comprehensive psychotherapy or model of change. Subsequent clinical experience, however, suggests ways in which the spirit and method of MI may be useful throughout processes of change. Im...