“Psychotherapy Relationships that Work III” by John C. Norcross and Michael J. Lambert.  Psychotherapy,  55(4):  303-315 (2018)*

This is a summary article for a special edition of the journal Psychotherapy, which has sixteen articles focusing on the current state of research about those aspects of the psychotherapy relationship that have been shown to have a direct impact on therapeutic outcomes. This is the third time that such a special edition has been put together and each is the fruit of a “Task Force of the American Psychological Association” (APA) that, in this case, was “commissioned … to identify, operationalize, and disseminate information on empirically supported therapy relationships” (p. 303). The previous two editions were in 1999 and 2009. Each Task Force gave rise to a book edited by John Norcross entitled Psychotherapy Relationships that Work (Norcross, 2002, 2011), and showed the extent to which the relationship between therapist and patient/client was instrumental in bringing about psychological change. This emphasis on empirically investigating the psychotherapy relationship is part of the investigation into “evidence-based” practice (APA Presidential Task Force on Evidence-Based Practice, 2006), in which evidence for and against the “common factors” argument for psychotherapy change (that there are things across therapies that are responsible) have been put alongside those for “specific factors” (that it is the techniques of the specific therapy that are responsible). This latest special edition of Psychotherapy takes up the work of the Interdivisional APA Task Force on Evidence-based Relationships and Responsiveness into identifying those elements of the therapeutic relationship that are effective and looking at the ways in which therapy is best adapted or tailored to the needs of individual patients. Another way of putting this is to say they were looking at “what works in general and what works for particular patients” (p. 304).

The Task Force again used the minimalist, agreed, and treatment independent definition of the therapeutic relationship of Gelso and Carter (198