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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]

This paper gives a brief outline of the Conversational Model which is among the best validated of currently employed psychotherapies. The theory is built around the idea that the central task of psychotherapy is to potentiate the emergence and amplification of that dualistic form of consciousness that William James called self. However, this state of mind cannot be acted upon as if it existed in isolation. Rather, it is part of an ecology that includes the form of relatedness that underpins it. No element of the ecology can change unless the other elements also change. Seen in this way, the form of relatedness is transformational. It is necessarily mediated by conversation consisting of more than its content, the simple transmission of information. The main point of the paper is that the form of the conversation manifests and constitutes not only a form of consciousness but also a form of relatedness. This conception provides a means of testing hypotheses of therapeutic action since it suggests that syntactical structuring, together with the other major elements of language, lexicon, and phonology, allow us to chart the waxings and wanings of personal being in the therapeutic conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often describe a longstanding depression or dysphoria central to the disorder. The dimension of chronic inner dysphoria is reflected in the DSM criterion of "emptiness" and is demonstrated on self-report measures of depression. In this paper, we report on outcomes for patients with BPD treated with outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapy based on the Conversational Model. Data were collected using the Zung depression scale and the Westmead severity scale at 1 year and at 2 years from two groups of patients. One group had 1 year in psychotherapy, the other had 2 years in therapy. While general symptom scores improved steadily over time in the two-year group, gains for the one-year group tapered off in the second year. Change in depression scores continued at an unchanged rate in the second year for the two-year group compared to a leveling out of gains in the group treated for one year. Gains in general symptom scores were more substantial, suggesting that change in affect occurs more slowly than other symptomatic changes. Drawing upon our findings and those of others in the field, it appears that this slowness of affective change may reflect that patients with BPD have an inner world where predominant negative affectivity became established early in life in the context of disturbances of relatedness. This has implications for the appropriate duration of psychotherapeutic engagement with this group. We argue for more prolonged psychotherapy in this group, which is consistent with current understanding of processes of attachment and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychiatric consultation has not been adequately exploited as a therapeutic device. Although, the original abstinent model for psychodynamic psychotherapy has become more flexible, passive listening with interventions to elicit diagnostic "data" remains the prevailing mode in psychiatric consultation. In this paper I develop the idea of the consultation as an active process (Viederman, M., 2002) that engages the patient emotionally for therapeutic effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews neuroscientific advances across the therapeutic disciplines and outlines new potential insights into understanding the biology of the psychotherapeutic processes. In a quest to understand the modus operandi of psychotherapy, the author reviews the evolution of the biology of psychotherapy. The mechanisms involved in learning processes, such as memory and priming, attachment, and long-term consequences of early life trauma, demonstrate how brain structures can be affected by environmental changes. Finally, the author proposes that verbal and non-verbal aspects of the psychotherapeutic process mediate their therapeutic effects through biological changes as they work on primitive emotional reflexes and stimulate mentalization processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of learning to conduct psychotherapy is extremely challenging, especially in the initial stages. It is not inappropriate for the novice to seek concrete guidance as to how to proceed in the initial work with the patient. Unfortunately, however, the therapist in training may be daunted by the psychodynamic/psychoanalytic literature, which is highly theoretical and bewildering in its diversity. The following material is a compilation of psychotherapy "pearls" that the authors have distilled from the psychotherapy literature, supervision with senior colleagues, and their own clinical experience.(n1) This article is intended as a primer of some technical aspects of psychodynamic work. An attempt has been made to select facets of technique that seem surprising to the inexperienced, as they are different from other types of conventional discourse. The authors have chosen to use "he" instead of "he/she" or "them" to make the paper stylistically more palatable. A bibliography is presented at the end as a guide for the beginning reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]