Faculty Bibliography

Thirty-two patients with personality disorder diagnoses were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions that vary on several techniques of brief dynamic psychotherapy. Seventeen patients constituted a waiting list control group. The two brief psychotherapies showed significant improvement on target complaints, SCL-90, and Social Adjustment Scale-SR compared with the control subjects. The two therapy groups were similar in overall outcome but showed interesting differences on several subscale measures. Process measurements of videotaped sessions revealed significant variations in frequencies of therapist interventions across the two treatment conditions, which validated planned differences in the treatment techniques.

Examined therapist-patient interactions in 16 cases of brief psychotherapy. Three types of therapist intervention (patient-therapist interpretations, patient-significant other interpretations, and clarifications) were compared in terms of the frequency of patient affective or defensive behavior that occurred in the 3 min following each. Therapist-intervention and patient-response episodes were investigated to determine their relationship to outcome at termination of therapy. Results indicate that patient-therapist interpretations followed by patient affect bear a significant relationship to improvement at termination, whereas an intervention followed by defensiveness correlates negatively with outcome.

The current study examined changes in the ratio of patients' affective and defensive behaviors during the course of brief psychodynamic psychotherapy. Treatments of 16 patients were videotaped. For each patient, four sessions were evaluated with a minute-by-minute coding system of process variables. When patients were grouped according to outcome scores, significant differences between the high outcome and the average-to-low outcome groups emerged. During the early phase of treatment, patients in both groups showed an average of one affective response per five defensive responses. By the late phase of treatment, the high outcome patients showed a marked shift to one affective response per two defensive responses, while the low outcome patients remained the same. An incidental finding was a negative correlation between good outcome and the ratio of defensive behavior to total patient activity.

Describes an approach to community treatment for chronic patients that sought to improve the residents' level of functioning and to reintegrate residents into the community. The social learning model used consisted of a token economy, a training skills program, and a social psychological component. Also discussed are issues relating to milieu participants, ethics, program effectiveness, and implications for community service planning. (9 ref)

This is a preliminary statement of the hypothesis that syntax in speech may act as an "incidental stimulus" in the communication of mental contents which the speaker is motivated both to conceal and to express. Ten clinical examples, taken from verbatim transcripts of one psychoanalyst's interventions in a recorded case, illustrate the expression of countertransference attitudes by syntactic and other linguistic properties such as: the agentless passive, pronominal ambiguity, yes/no questions, extraposition, the pseudocleft construction, delaying tactics, the passive construction and conceptual focus, lists and logical complexity, foregrounding, syntactic and lexical ambiguity, subordinate clauses and syntactic opacity.