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Research for the efficacy of psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically oriented therapies is accumulating. There has been a long-standing belief held by the public and many mental health professionals that psychoanalytically based therapies do not have empirical support, or do not have nearly as much empirical support as cognitive-behavioral therapies and medications have. This issue will contribute to eradicating that perception. It will provide psychoanalytic practitioners with a plethora of evidence that argues for the efficacy of their way of working and it provides nonpsychoanalytic practitioners such data to consider.
From 1913 to 1960 psychology was dominated by behaviorism. During the 1960s psychology witnessed a “cognitive” revolution (Gardner, 1988). In most departments of psychology in U.S. universities, scholars with psychoanalytic leanings were not hired. Research on outcomes in psychotherapy was thus conducted largely by those with cognitive and behavioral orientations. As the movement toward evidence-based medicine grew, researchers were pressed to demonstrate that psychotherapy was also helpful in treating many disorders, not only pharmacotherapy. When a task force in psychology went to establish a list of empirically validated therapies, research had already been conducted by psychologists examining the short-term therapies that cognitive-behaviorists advocated.
The list of empirically validated therapies, originally composed in 1995 by a task force of the Clinical Psychology Division of the American
Psychological Association, was derived only from data of randomized control trials (RCTs), of people with specific disorders given manualized treatments. The researchers must also have had a control group and provided evidence conducted in more than one study by one team of researchers. The original list included 18 treatments and no psychodynamic treatments, because no RCTs on psychodynamic treatments had been conducted at that time.† One of these, the Nat