Techniques to accelerate dynamic psychotherapy.

Abstract

The techniques described above outline specific ways to deepen the patient's affective experience within an emotionally close therapeutic relationship. When effective, they all enhance the patient/therapist bond, raise self-esteem, reduce defensiveness and anxiety, and facilitate emotional healing. Psychodynamic treatment, long or short, is a complex process uniquely constructed by each therapist/patient pair. AEDP strategies are not intended as recipes for treatment. Good dynamic work depends on the therapist's ability to grasp the patient's capacities and limitations, understand relational dynamics, and interact with the patient in an empathically attuned, emotionally receptive, and flexible way. In that context, these strategies can be helpful tools to facilitate and accelerate the process. The choices made by AEDP--privileging adaptive strivings over defensive reactions, the stance of emotional engagement rather than neutrality and abstinence, the focus on health and change over pathology and stasis--are informed by traditional STDP aims to maximize depth, effectiveness, and efficiency. AEDP's contribution is a set of techniques relying on a response repertoire that is available to a wide range of therapists. Therapists can use these techniques to be more effective while simultaneously retaining the experience of speaking with patients in an authentic voice.