Neuroimaging studies of depression have demonstrated treatment-specific changes involving the limbic system and regulatory regions in the prefrontal cortex. While these studies have examined the effect of short-term, interpersonal or cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy, the effect of long-term, psychodynamic intervention has never been assessed. Here, we investigated recurrently depressed (DSM-...

Objective: Both the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Psychological Association have called upon psychodynamic practitioners to start demonstrating their outcomes. This effectiveness study attempted to begin to answer these calls. Method: The study was a secondary analysis of data from a multidisciplinary, psychodynamic mental health clinic. It used a single-group, within-sub...

It was just over a generation ago that the routine combination of psychotherapy and drug therapy seemed impossible. Especially in America, psychiatry was polarized by ideologic and political struggles between psychoanalysis and biologic psychiatry. American psychoanalysts tended to regard psychopharmacology as an inferior treatment that covered over problems rather than addressing them. They as...

Somatoform disorder patients show a variety of emotional disturbances including impaired emotion recognition and increased empathic distress. In a previous paper, our group showed that several brain regions involved in emotional processing, such as the parahippocampal gyrus and other regions, were less activated in pre-treatment somatoform disorder patients (compared to healthy controls) during...

Systematic research on psychoanalytic treatments has been limited by several factors, including a belief that clinical experience can demonstrate the effectiveness of psychoanalysis, rendering systematic research unnecessary, the view that psychoanalytic research would be difficult or impossible to accomplish, and a concern that research would distort the treatment being delivered. In recent ye...

There is a gap between proposed theoretical attachment theory frameworks, measures of attachment in the assessment phase and their relationship with changes in outcome after a psychodynamic oriented psychotherapy. Based on a clinical case study of a young woman with Panic Attack Disorder, this paper examined psychotherapy outcome findings comparing initial and post-treatment assessments, accord...

It was just over a generation ago that the routine combination of psychotherapy and drug therapy seemed impossible. Especially in America, psychiatry was polarized by ideologic and political struggles between psychoanalysis and biologic psychiatry. American psychoanalysts tended to regard psychopharmacology as an inferior treatment that covered over problems rather than addressing them. They as...

an eclectic form of psychodynamic psychotherapy is presented to address the emotional problems of exceptionally and profoundly gifted adolescents and adults. the approach includes cognitive/behavioral techniques as well as psychologically informed mentoring, coaching, and advising. once a psychodynamic formulation was established, it was used to guide all subsequent therapeutic interventions. t...

Treatment Disrupting Behaviors during Psychotherapy of Patients with Personality Disorders: The Predictive Power of Psychodynamic Personality Diagnosis. Epilogue Chapter 9 General Discussion Summary Samenvatting List of Publications Dankwoord Curriculum Vitae

The article reviews the current state and future of psychodynamic psychotherapies. In the past few decades psychodynamic psychotherapies have fallen into disrepute due to the fractious and dogmatic nature of different psychodynamic schools of thought and the lack of interest in validating some of its major premises or its effectiveness in comparison with other psychotherapy modalities. Despite ...