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“Empirical research methodology is developing rapidly. It will be applied to psychoanalytic propositions, and many of our favorite ideas will be shown to be wrong or what amounts to be same thing, not useful. Psychoanalysts should learn to entertain this prospect as good news rather than bad news” (Cooper, 1993, p. 391). Despite Cooper's (1993) exhortation of 20 years ago, psychoanalysts are still having difficulty viewing empirical research as the source of good news, and there is a persistent lack of interest in the emerging research literature (Busch & Milrod, 2010). Although there has been a rapid growth in psychodynamic psychotherapy manuals in the last 20 years, these manualized treatments are not well known to many psychoanalysts. Manuals have often been viewed as overly rigid, interfering with the proper conduct of psychodynamic psychotherapy (Blatt, 2001).
In this volume, we present a series of manualized psychodynamic psychotherapies that have been employed in the service of psychodynamic research, with the goal of familiarizing psychoanalysts with some of this work. We are pleased to include psychodynamic treatments that have demonstrated effectiveness in systematic studies, developed by pioneers in the field of psychoanalytic research. Each article contains a summary of a particular manualized treatment approach, a case example of the approach, and a summary of research conducted on the treatment. The articles provide an overview of how each group of researchers move from theory to manualization to research.
The various treatments employ a wide range of theoretical and clinical orientations for a variety of syndromes. Diamond et al. adapt Transference Focused Psychotherapy, which focuses on the centrality of transference interpretations in the treatment of borderline personality disorder, to patients with comorbid borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. Lemma, Target, and Fonagy's Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy identifies and addresses an interpe