Effectiveness of Intensive and Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) on Defense Mechanisms and Emotional Expression in individuals with Coronavirus-induced Death Anxiety

The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Intensive and Short-Term Dynamic Therapy (ISTDP) on defense mechanisms and emotional expression in individuals with coronavirus-induced death anxiety. The method of the present study was quasi-experimental with pre-test, post-test & follow-up design with the control group. The statistical population of the present study included all undergraduate students of accounting at the Azad University of Tehran in the first semester of 2021, who scored higher than the cut-off (70 and above) in the coronavirus-induced death anxiety that 34 people selected in a purposive manner after screening and randomly divided into experimental and control groups (17 people in each group). Treatment (8 sessions of 75 minutes per week) was presented to the experimental group individually. Also for data collection, Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ, Andrews, et al., 1993), Expressed Emotion (EEQ, King and Ammons, 1990), and Coronavirus-induced Death Anxiety (CDA, Naji, 2021) were used and analyzed by Multivariate analysis of variance. The results showed that intensive and short-term dynamic therapy reduces coronavirus-induced death anxiety, and neurotic and immature defenses, and increases emotional and mature defenses. (p<0.01). Dynamic psychotherapy can facilitate coping strategies with anxiety and how to express emotion, and dynamic psychotherapy allows better defense mechanisms to be used. Therefore, it can be said that according to the intended therapeutic goals, dynamic psychotherapy can be used to affect different dimensions of individual problems.