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.
The recent presentation of audiovisual tapes in Switzerland by Drs. Davanloo and Malan was designed to introduce to the uninitiated the techniques of dynamic psychotherapy developed over the years by Dr. Davanloo during his work in Montreal. The first two days were concerned with tapes of the initial interview with the patient and with early sessions during the subsequent therapy. On the third day tapes of follow-up sessions were shown, up to nine years after termination; in these, the patient was invited to watch and comment upon extracts from the tapes of his therapy. We were also shown the tape of a female patient whose therapy had been extended when it became known that her father was terminally ill.
Dr. Habib Davanloo was born in Persia into a family of the professional class. He trained as a surgeon before emigrating to the United States in the 1950s, without knowing a word of English, and worked for some time as a surgeon in New York. After working with Lindemann, he became interested in psychoanalysis and trained as an analyst. Disillusionment over the length of time needed to carry out a full-scale analysis led him to develop his own technique in conjunction with rigorous research procedures as to its effectiveness. Dr. David Malan, the leading exponent of short-term dynamic psychotherapy in this country and the man who has completed the most research on this form of psychotherapy, has been working closely with Dr. Davanloo for a number of years, insofar as the distance between Montreal, where the latter is based, and the Tavistock Clinic will permit.
The techniques employed by Dr. Davanloo are firmly rooted in the standard psychoanalytic principles underlying all dynamic psychotherapy. These may be understood most easily with the aid of the Malan-Menninger triangles described by David Malan (1979).
The author is Registrar in Psychiatry at Littlemore Hospital, Littlemore, Oxford. [This comment was submitted independently of Angela Molnos's comment on the same