Empirical Evidence for the Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies and Psychoanalysis: An Overview

There is a wealth of empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of the psychoanalytic psychotherapies and psychoanalysis. Though there are over one hundred different types of psychotherapy, a recent review of the forty major international psychotherapy research programs found that eighteen of these programs are mainly psychoanalytic in orientation (Beutler and Crago, 1991). Thus the psychoanalytic psychotherapies, from the various forms of face-to-face psychoanalytic (sometimes called psychodynamic) psychotherapies to psychoanalysis, not only have been, but continue to be, among the most intensively studied of treatments.

Indeed, they are the most widely practiced of the major forms of psychotherapy. Marmor (1975), in a survey of practice conducted while he was president of the American Psychiatric Association, showed that the psychoanalytic psychotherapies were the most frequently used of all treatments by outpatient psychiatrists. Wiener (1994), president of the American Psychiatric Association, recently argued that “psychodynamic psychotherapy still seems to be the most