Is the quality of therapeutic collaboration associated with the assimilation of problematic experiences progress? A comparison of two cases.

Objective: How are collaborative interactions associated with clients' progress in therapy? This study addressed this question, by assessing the quality of therapeutic collaboration and comparing it passage by passage with the clients' assimilation of problematic experiences in two cases of major depression treated with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one recovered and one improved-but-not-recovered.

Method: We used the Therapeutic Collaboration Coding System to code collaborative work and the Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Scale (APES) to rate clients' progress. In both cases, for the distribution of specific collaborative therapeutic exchanges, we tested for the difference of empirical means between lower and higher APES levels.