You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is widely acknowledged that whatever misgivings some may have about empirical research, data that support the effectiveness of psychoanalysis can only help our field in this era of evidence-based therapeutics. This is especially so if the study design has the methodological rigor to ensure acceptance of the results beyond the borders of psychoanalysis and if the study compares psychoanalysis to the currently popular briefer-term psychotherapies. However, conducting studies of long-term treatments is a complex venture in myriad ways. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to develop a study design that strikes the right balance between clinical relevance and rigorous methodology. It is not surprising that the number of meaningful outcome studies of psychoanalysis is painfully small, and so when such a study is completed the results should be widely known and discussed among psychoanalysts.
Recently Dorothea Huber and colleagues published the results of a three-year follow-up of the Munich Psychotherapy Study. This study included patients with chronic unipolar depression and randomized them to treatment in one of three conditions: cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), 40-60 sessions at a frequency of one session a week; psychodynamic therapy (PD), 50-80 sessions also at a frequency of one session a week; or psychoanalysis (PSA), 160-240 sessions at a frequency of two to three sessions a week with the patient lying on the couch (a lesser frequency and shorter duration than is common for psychoanalytic treatments conducted in the United States). According to the authors, the study “is designed to