Facilitating client collaboration and insight through interpretations and probes for insight in psychodynamic psychotherapy: A case study of one client with three successive therapists

We investigated therapist interpretations (Ints) and probes for insight (PIs) in relation to changes in client collaboration and insight for 1 male client paired with 3 successive doctoral student therapists in psychodynamic psychotherapy for 192 sessions over 5 years. Judges coded client collaboration and insight in the antecedent and subsequent 3 min for all Ints and PIs in each of 6 middle sessions for each treatment. Qualitative analyses showed that PIs were more helpful than Ints for this defended client. More gains in collaboration were found when antecedent client collaboration was high, antecedent client insight was low, and therapists gave PIs instead of Ints, but no differences were found among therapists. More gains in insight were found when antecedent insight in a given session was higher than in other sessions with the same therapist, with Therapist 3 facilitating more insight than Therapist 1; no differences were found between Ints and PIs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).