Psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder: mentalization based therapy and cognitive analytic therapy compared.

Mentalization Based Therapy (MBT) and Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) are among a small number of psychotherapy approaches offering specific methods for the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). They share a number of features, notably both seek to integrate ideas and methods from psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology, pay attention to early attachment experiences and see harsh and inconsistent care, in combination with biological vulnerability, as playing an important part in the genesis of BPD offer treatment based on a developmental understanding of BPD, taking account of recent developments in observational research seek to provide therapy appropriate for use in the public service. These similarities, however, conceal a number of differences in underlying assumptions and emphases and are linked with contrasting therapeutic techniques.

Multiplicity of selves and others: cognitive analytic therapy.

In cognitive analytic therapy (CAT), multiplicity is understood in terms of a range of self-other patterns (reciprocal role relationships) originating in childhood. These alternate in determining experience and action according to the situation (contextual multiplicity). They may be restricted by adverse childhood experiences (diminished multiplicity), and severe deprivation or abuse may result in a structural dissociation of self-processes ( pathological multiplicity).

Resolving threats to the therapeutic alliance in cognitive analytic therapy of borderline personality disorder: a task analysis.

Background: Alliance ruptures and premature drop out from psychotherapy are very common with patients who have a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, limiting the clinical effectiveness of treatment.

Aim: To test and refine a model of how therapists successfully resolve threats to the therapeutic alliance involving enactment of problematic relationship patterns in the cognitive analytic therapy of borderline personality disorder.

Method: Task analysis (Greenberg, 1984a) of 107 enactments from 66 sessions in four good outcome cases, compared with 35 enactments from 16 sessions in two poor outcome cases.

The contribution of cognitive analytic therapy to the treatment of borderline personality disorder.

This article describes ways the theory and practice of cognitive analytic therapy (CAT) can contribute to the treatment and management of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD). CAT, as its name suggests, was derived initially from an integration of conventionally opposed models. From the beginning, it was delivered within a limited timeframe, usually of 16 weekly sessions, extended to 24 in the case of more disturbed patients.

Something more than the 'something more than interpretation' is needed: a comment on the paper by the Process of Change Study Group.

A critique is offered of the paper on non-interpretive mechanisms in psychoanalytic therapy by the Process of Change Study Group (Stern et al., 1998a). The attention paid to procedural learning and to the need to attend to implicit relational knowledge is welcomed but a number of the group's assumptions are questioned.