In the competition between therapy modalities in the United States today, group psychotherapy is clearly on the ropes. As I write these words, the Commission for the Recognition of Specialties and Proficiencies in Professional Psychology (CRSPPP) of the American Psychological Association is considering another petition offered by APA Division 49 (Group Psychotherapy) to have group […]
If you are a psychotherapist of a certain age you no doubt remember the 1982 New York Times Magazine article on Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (STDP; Davanloo, 1980) by journalist Dava Sobel. In contrasting STDP (“the most aggressive form of psychic medicine to rest on the principles of Sigmund Freud”) to traditional psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Sobel noted, […]
Abstract In the context of a randomized clinical trial of psychoanalytic psychotherapy (PPT) versus cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for bulimia nervosa (BN), this study performed secondary analyses of (a) the relation between attachment and pretreatment symptom levels, (b) whether client pretreatment attachment moderated treatment outcome, (c) whether change in client attachment was associated with symptomatic change, and (d) whether […]
Jeremy Holmes (2014) offers here a book, rich with the wisdom of an experienced clinician, that celebrates the imagination as an essential component of the psychotherapeutic process, using examples from literature to provide insight into important aspects of clinical work. He argues that literature and psychodynamic therapy share an “aesthetics” based upon a “paradoxical combination […]