This is a form of therapy that looks at unconscious ideas and thoughts, the client’s relationship with them, and how they are displayed in the relationship between client and therapist.
What’s the evidence for it?
There is particularly strong evidence that has informed recent clinical guidelines underlining its value in the treatment of longer-term attachment and ’personality disorder’ issues.
Clinically, we have found the approach, particularly in a more conversational or interpersonal form, very useful for understanding how relationships play out between the client and significant others in their lives. These, more recent, psychodynamic approaches can be readily integrated with other psychotherapies.
What can it be useful to treat?
For longer-term therapy with people attachment issues, where loss and difficulties in childhood have been consistently present in someone’s life. This approach needs a lot of commitment, but can aid understanding of how relationships work for an individual and how these work in relation to others. This treatment can be particularly powerful if undertaken in groups, as well as 1:1.
Talking Therapies has it’s own practitioners as well as a relationship with Brighton Psychotherapy & Counselling as well as The Rock Clinic Association, and we will mutually cross refer potential clients, if our service is not quite right.
What is it less useful to treat?
Both in research and through extensive client feedback, that a less communicative approach can put people off and can result in them terminating therapy quickly as a result.
There is also ‘uncertainty of the effectiveness of…psychodynamic therapy in treating depression’ (NICE CG90 2010 edition, P573).
Although this approach is useful there is less research to substantiate its use in comparison to CBT.
This form of therapy relies less on a medical model [relying on diagnosis] which makes it less easy to research, leading to less research being done and the objection of some of its practitioners to the quantification of outcomes in therapy. However, it can be argued that this is a strength to this type of approach to therapy.
We will happily consider dynamic and analytic psychotherapy in our assessment, but will only provide that therapy where both the client and practitioner clearly agree that this approach may be of most use from an informed position of consent.
Talking Therapies offers proven Psychoanalytic and IPT therapy in Brighton, and will be developing the service to offer these therapies, over Sussex, Surrey and Kent as well as London.
Do contact us if you are considering psychodynamic or psychoanalytic psychotherapy in Brighton or the south east counties.