How I Have Changed Over Time as a Psychotherapist.

Reflecting on my career as a psychotherapist has led me to consider 3 major areas that have affected the way I practice, namely, assimilative integration, the visions of reality, and brief psychodynamic therapy. Although starting out as a traditional psychoanalytic therapist, I became more integrative as I was exposed to other approaches and to patients with a variety of needs. As a result I developed a mode of integration, which I call assimilative.

Three mechanisms of change in psychodynamic therapy: insight, affect, and alliance.

Excerpts of therapist-patient dialogue are presented to demonstrate three important elements of a successful session of psychodynamic therapy. These are the provision of insight through the use of transference, a focus on patient affect, and the therapist's attention to aspects of the therapeutic alliance. The article, in addition to explicating the clinical process in psychodynamic therapy, gives a theoretical explanation for the emphasis on each of these three elements and provides research support for their application.

An adjudicated hermeneutic single-case efficacy design study of experiential therapy for panic/phobia.

This article illustrates the application of an adjudicated form of hermeneutic single-case efficacy design, a critical-reflective method for inferring change and therapeutic influence in single therapy cases. The client was a 61-year-old European-American male diagnosed with panic and bridge phobia. He was seen for 23 sessions of individual process-experiential/emotion-focused therapy.

Responding and failing to respond to both hypnosis and a kinesthetic illusion, Chevreul's Pendulum.

In this study, participants who failed to exhibit pendulum movement in response to Chevreul's Pendulum (CP) instructions had lower Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A (SHSS:A) scores and reported experiencing less subjective response to hypnosis than did their counterparts who exhibited CP movement. However, intensity scores on Shor's Personal Experiences Questionnaire (PEQ) did not differ between pass- and fail-CP groups. Additionally, pass-CP participants showed positive correlations between PEQ intensity scores and hypnotizability scores, while fail-CP participants showed negative correlations among these measures.

A psychodynamic perspective on resistance in psychotherapy: vive la résistance.

The term resistance has an overly negative connotation, indicating a recalcitrant, oppositional tendency on the part of psychotherapy clients. This article emphasizes the inevitability and ubiquity of resistance and argues that it should be greeted as a therapist's friend, not as an enemy. It is the way in which clients present themselves to the world in general and to the therapist in particular.