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.
A number of questions are suggested by the three decades of experience with short-term dynamic psychotherapy that are of fundamental importance to psychoanalysts and to psychoanalysis. First of all, what is the nature of the changes achieved in short-term psychotherapy and how do they compare to the changes seen in psychoanalysis? Second, how does brief psychotherapy achieve its results and how can they be reconciled with the psychoanalytic theory of therapy? Third, is short-term psychotherapy something a respectable psychoanalyst ought to be doing? And fourth, can the study of short-term dynamic psychotherapy illuminate the nature of the therapeutic process in formal psychoanalysis and in nonlimited, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, that is, in the treatment activities most psychoanalysts spend most of their time pursuing? These are the issues this paper will attempt to address, albeit in a preliminary way.
Before doing so, however, it might be well briefly to describe and define short-term dynamic psychotherapy. It is a treatment modality in which a single conflict underlying a patient's main complaint or symptom is focused upon actively and tenaciously during a series of weekly vis à vis sessions, usually numbering 12 to 20, with an upper limit of 30. Psychodynamic principles are used to understand and trace the focal conflict back to its origin. Transference attitudes and distortions related to the focal conflict are confronted actively as they arise. Short-term dynamic psychotherapy must be differentiated from other brief psychotherapies
Dr. Weissberg is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; Chairman, Rado Advanced Psychoanalytic Seminar on Short-Term Psychotherapy; and Director, Association for Short-Term Psychotherapy.