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A cognitive behavior therapy and a matched short-term dynamic therapy from a pilot study led by Perry and Robertson (Trijsburg, Semeniuk, and Perry in press) were assessed using the Analytic Process Scales, or APS (Waldron et al. 2004a, b). Using an extensive coding manual, the APS facilitates the assessment of tape-recorded sessions, enabling the evaluation of the nature and quality of the contributions of analyst and patient to the psychoanalytic process and to study their interactions. Clinical psychology interns achieved good reliability, rating a total of 185 segments from tape recordings of an early and a late session from each case (mean “alpha” coefficient with three or four raters was.68), without requiring extensive training in the use of the APS.
The nature of the work by each therapist-patient pair was examined, showing marked differences between the two cases in “core analytic activities,” including clarifying, interpreting, addressing inner conflict, and addressing transference manifestations, in the expected direction. Although the CBT case showed substantially less of these core analytic activities by the therapist than did the psychodynamic case (approximately half as much of each of the core analytic activities), the levels of these activities in the CBT case were nevertheless substantial.
A regression analysis provided a confirmation of the findings of Waldronet al. (2004b) that the quality of the therapist's communication has a pivotal role in facilitating the patient's subsequent communication. The assessment of quality includes the aptness of the type of intervention, the usefulness of its content, and the skill of presentation, including tact, timing, and language appeal.
The facilitating role of quality applies both to the psychodynamic treatment and to CBT, a striking finding extending the findings of Ablon and Jones (1998). These authors found using a different instrument, the Psychodynamic Process Q-sort (PQS), that it was the psycho-dynamic