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An emerging hypothesis in psychotherapy outcome research is that positive changes in individuals' representations of self and others (e.g., parents, significant others, therapists) is one of several key manifestations of successful psychotherapy (e.g., Blatt et al., 1991). The present study sought to investigate changes in patients' self-representation over the course of their psychotherapy. Of specific interest was the extent to which such changes, as reflected in self-descriptions, are influenced by patient gender and length of time spent in psychotherapy.
Self-representations and object-representations are concepts central to an increasing number of psychotherapeutic schools and approaches. Whether referred to as “schemas,”“scripts,”or “mental models,”these inner images are seen as templates that guide behavior and feelings. Self-representations are essentially ideas that the subject has about his or her own person, ranging from attitudes toward a minor detail on one's body to feelings about one's “general”type of personality (Schafer, 1968). These representations, according to Schafer, “may range from highly realistic to autistic, from highly organized, differentiated, and synthesized to amorphous and fluid, from intensely physical or emotional to abstractly contemplative, from self-aggrandizing to self-abasing, and from the conditional and hypothetical to the actually experienced”(pp. 26-27). In addition, because we are “capable of thinking about ourselves in many different ways at any given moment”(Greenberg, 1991, p. 171),