The Clinical Significance of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Treatment
Click Here To Read: The Clinical Significance of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Treatment by Casper C. Bergout and Jolien Zavalnik in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic.
This article originally appeared as: Bergout, Casper C. and Zevalnik, Jolien. (2009). The Clinical Significance of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Treatment. The Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. Volume 73(1): 7-3 and appears here with all requisite rights and permissions.
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June 11th, 2009 at 5:26 am
While I was neither able to read the entire study nor have the sophistication of a researcher in outcome research, the sentence on p. 11 indicating that these were not controlled samples made me wonder the following. Clinically I believe that patients chosen for psychoanalytic treatment have some degree of “analyzability” and those patients deemed less optimistically are often given psychotherapy. Comparing the two treatments would in a sense be comparing
patients with milder cardiovascular pathology treated with angioplasty with more serious
cardiac pathology with by-pass surgery. The first group might have better outcomes suggesting angioplasty as a more successful treatment.
My musings raise all sorts of questions about the equivalency of psychological diagnoses and physical diagnoses, the equivalency of the training of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, a rather controversial subject these days. I’l stop here as the topic is too vast and complex to do it full justice. My compliments to the authors for their efforts.
Fred Sander