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Borderline personality disorder is a prevalent psychopathology; thus, most graduate students in psychology, residents in psychiatry, and early career clinicians will encounter patients with this disorder in the course of their training or initial professional practice. This paper provides clear and concise guidelines for conducting treatment geared toward the clinician's developmental level. It builds upon the knowledge and skills that are typically acquired during graduate education and training to provide an accessible framework for undertaking psychotherapy with patients who have borderline personality disorder. This paper draws upon common psychotherapeutic factors and existing evidence-based treatments for the disorder to identify principals and interventions that are likely to contribute to therapeutic action. It uses behavioral, cognitive, and psychodynamic interventions to address the patient's multidimensional psychopathology. This approach offers a coherent and integrated treatment framework for the beginning psychotherapy practitioner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last several decades, brief psychotherapeutic approaches to mental health treatment have become increasingly prevalent. This paper describes brief psychotherapy and provides a brief review of the relevant empirical literature. Therapists who are unfamiliar with brief psychotherapy will find that this paper provides a concise introduction to the essential processes and outcomes of this therapeutic approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the case is made that providing therapy to a client can be therapeutic for the therapist. Therapist change is not intentionally sought nor professionally delivered, but is from those client interactions experienced as healing. The possible mechanisms of change for the therapist include exposure of much about him- or herself, being "on the line" in therapy, and the therapeutic relationship as a collaborative, two-way system. In the collaborative system, much might affect a therapist, including how the client understands and reacts to the therapist's disposition, motivation, self-disclosure, and skill and what the client reveals about his or her life that may lead the therapist to a new sense of her or his own life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an experiential process-directive approach is presented in which the therapist is guided by the Rogerian core attitudes for offering a therapeutic relationship and for intervening in a process-enhancing way. I elaborate on how interventions that originate in the therapist's empathic-resonance process influence the client's experiencing in a process-enhancing way. A process-diagnostic model, based on distinctions among different aspects of the experiential exploration process, forms the framework in which the various interventions are classified according to dominant process intention. Three major process intentions are distinguished: becoming aware of experiencing, regulating (increasing or decreasing) the intensity of experiencing so that it becomes possible to hold the experience in attention, and exploring that leads to further unfolding and change. Therapy excerpts illustrate this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Therapists who are accustomed to operating in a world where gender roles are becoming increasingly androgynous may underestimate how foreign the experience of psychotherapy can be to "traditional" men. This paper describes the occurrence of transference and resistance encountered by female therapists when seeing male patients at a Veterans Administration (V.A.) Medical Center who identify with traditional American male gender roles. The discussion is informed by recent advances in the theory of male gender identity development and yields new insights into the typical defenses men may bring to the early phases of psychotherapy. Case examples from the authors' practices illustrate strategies for intervening with resistance and enhancing the therapeutic alliance. Common countertransference issues encountered by therapists working with "traditional" men are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forensic experts agree that the doctrine of informed consent now applies to psychotherapy. The optimum level of detail and content in this interaction remains nebulous. This study examines opinions and practices of therapists. The authors administered a survey regarding this subject to 231 psychotherapists. Six scales were constructed from this survey. High scores on these scales suggest more positive opinions regarding the application of the doctrine of informed consent to psychotherapy. Psychiatrists scored significantly lower on the Informed Consent (p=0. 005), Written Consent (p<0. 01), and Self-Disclosure (p=0.026) scales than other types of therapists (suggesting a more negative opinion of the application of this doctrine to psychotherapy). Interpersonal therapists scored significantly higher than psychodynamic psychotherapists on the Informed Consent (p=0. 003) and Patient (p=0. 003) scales. Psychodynamic psychotherapists scored significantly lower than therapists with different modalities on the Written Consent scale. This paper suggests that opinions and practices of informed consent for psychotherapy vary with the characteristics of the therapist. More research m this area could serve as a guide for therapists embarking on the process of informed consent or for professional organzations who wish to establish guidelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the psychological consequences of a social ethos that has emerged in the 1990s; the Bourgeois Bohemian (in short, Bobo) that claims that the bourgeois striving for financial success and status can be reconciled with the Bohemian striving for creative self-expression. An extended case history shows how a man in his thirties grappled with the inherent complexity and contradictions of the Bobo ethos. The question is raised how, as psychotherapists, we can deal with the individual patient's search for a good life amidst the growing pressure of the Bobo ethos, to get the best of all possible lives, the combination of authenticity and success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]