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Evidence from studies that have focused on the effects of therapist variables on treatment outcome suggests that a moderate amount of variance in patient outcomes is attributable to therapist differences, regardless of the type of
treatment practiced. In the literature, researchers have considered gender of the therapist, therapists' experience and training, therapists' treatment attitudes, and self-reported attachment style to be relevant therapist variables (e.g., Beutler et al. 2004). In the present study, we investigated whether these therapist variables are related to patient outcome in a group of patients after psychoanalysis and a group of patients after psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
The patient sample (N = 97) originated from a project, with participants from four mental health care organizations in the Netherlands, designed to study the effectiveness of long-term psychoanalytic treatment. For the present study, we focused on patients who had ended long-term psychoanalytic treatment. One group of patients had received psychoanalysis (PA; n = 40); the other group had received psychoanalytic psychotherapy (PP; n = 57). Patient outcome was assessed by using the three outcome factors that were found in the PCA factor analyses: General distress, Introversion, and Disadaptation and disorganization (see Berghout, Zevalkink, and de Jong 2010).
All therapists (N=53) in the project were licensed clinicians (psychiatrist-psychotherapists or psychologist-psychotherapists) and members of one of the Netherlands psychoanalytic societies. Of the 53 therapists, 33 were female (62%) and 20 were male (38%). The mean age was 54.5 years (SD = 7.5). The average length of therapeutic experience was 24.3 years (SD = 10.7), where the number of years after licensing (M = 17.2, SD = 9.3) was greater than the number of years before licensing (M = 7.1, SD = 6.3).
The Therapeutic Attitudes Scales-2 (TASC-2; Sandell et al. 2004) was used to assess therapist variables. It consists of