Psychoanalysis and Brief Psychotherapy

The term 'brief psychotherapy' is used in preference to 'psychotherapy'—which has the support of wide current usage—because the latter ignores the historical fact that psychoanalysis is a special and relatively new branch of psychotherapy. The adjective 'psychoanalytic' has merit, but facilitates the blurring of distinctions. The adjective 'nonanalytic' sharpens the distinction from psychoanalysis but gives a negative inferential place, if any, to the psychoanalytic rationale, from the analyst's viewpoint, that any psychotherapeutic technique may have. While the actual brevity of psychotherapy is highly variable, the qualification connotes the effort to meet the current tremendous need and demand for treatment, and the consequent prevailing tendency in research, i.e., toward diminution of the total time involved in treatment.

Psychoanalysis, as is any science, is full of unsolved problems (25), (41). However, it is a relatively well-defined and systematized procedure, compared to this large and chaotic field, ranging from simple suggestion to the procedure most usually referred to as 'psychotherapy', which bears a superficial resemblance to psychoanalysis but which, because of the inclusion of important variables, is very poorly defined, highly unpredictable, and exceedingly difficult to evaluate. The only exception to this general characterization lies in those few instances where the trained analyst treats a patient at long but regular intervals, and follows sound and well-defined psychoanalytic precepts in his general management of the case. Here, there is only one important immediately discernible variable, the infrequency