Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

An in-depth examination of psychodynamic therapy's foundations, methods, evidence base, and limitations

What Is Psychodynamic Psychotherapy?

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a family of treatments descended from psychoanalysis, organized around a single wager: that much of mental life is not transparent to its owner. Feelings, motives, conflicts, and patterns of relating operate outside awareness; symptoms and self-defeating behavior are not random malfunctions but meaningful—compromises, communications, and repetitions whose logic can be understood; and durable change comes from expanding what a person can know, feel, and freely choose about their own inner life. Where CBT asks what are you thinking and doing, and does it work?, psychodynamic therapy asks what is going on in you that you do not yet know about—and how is it living itself out, right now, including in this room?

It is important to distinguish psychodynamic psychotherapy from psychoanalysis proper. Psychoanalysis is the intensive original: three to five sessions weekly, often on the couch, for years, with maximal therapist neutrality and free association as the method. Psychodynamic (or psychoanalytic) psychotherapy is the broad, adaptable descendant practiced face to face, typically once or twice weekly, in formats from a dozen sessions to several years, across the ordinary range of outpatient psychiatry. It retains the parent's model of the mind while operating at the depth, frequency, and focus the clinical situation allows. Everything in this document concerns the psychotherapy unless otherwise noted.

What actually distinguishes psychodynamic technique? The best empirical answer comes from Blagys and Hilsenroth's comparative process research, popularized by Jonathan Shedler: seven features reliably differentiate dynamic therapy from CBT in session recordings.

1. Focus on affect and the expression of emotion — pursuing feeling, especially contradictory, troubling, and avoided feeling, rather than primarily thought.
2. Exploration of avoidance — attending to what the patient does not say, skips past, arrives late for, or deflects with humor; resistance treated as information, not obstruction.
3. Identification of recurring themes and patterns — in relationships, work, self-sabotage; the repetitions the patient may see but feel helpless to escape, or not see at all.
4. Developmental focus — past experience, particularly early attachment and family life, as it shapes the present; not archaeology for its own sake, but the question of how the past is alive now.
5. Focus on interpersonal relations — intimacy, rivalry, dependency, and the internalized templates of self-with-other that organize them.
6. Focus on the therapy relationship — transference: the patient's characteristic patterns emerging toward the therapist, where they can be observed live and worked with directly.
7. Exploration of wishes and fantasies — dreams, daydreams, desires; the mind allowed to speak freely rather than be kept on task.

Two further commitments define the tradition. First, a goal beyond symptom remission: the cultivation of inner capacities—to love and work, to tolerate one's own feelings, to know one's mind, to have freer and more satisfying relationships—on the premise that these capacities are what prevent the next episode. Second, the therapist's own mind as instrument: countertransference, the feelings the patient evokes in the therapist, is treated not as contamination but as data about what the patient does to the people in their life.

Historical Development

Freud and the founding architecture

Psychoanalysis began in 1890s Vienna with Sigmund Freud's studies of hysteria and matured across four decades into the founding architecture: unconscious mental life; symptoms as meaningful compromise formations; repression and defense; transference as the engine of treatment; the interpretation of dreams and slips; and a developmental theory in which adult character is shaped by childhood passion and conflict. Much of Freud's specific content—the libidinal stage theory, the universality of the Oedipus complex, the death drive—has been abandoned or radically revised even within the tradition; the durable inheritance is the form of the questions: that the mind conflicts with itself, deceives itself, and repeats itself, and that a disciplined relationship can make those operations visible.

The branching schools

The century after Freud produced successive reworkings, each contributing tools still in daily clinical use:

Ego psychology (Anna Freud, Hartmann) systematized defense mechanisms—the mind's repertoire for managing unbearable affect—and shifted attention to adaptation and the analysis of defense before content, a sequencing rule brief dynamic therapy still follows.

Object relations (Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bion) relocated the center of the mind from drives to relationships: we internalize early relational experience as templates ("internal objects," self- and other-representations joined by characteristic affects) through which all later relationships are filtered. Winnicott contributed the holding environment, the good-enough mother, the true and false self; Bion, containment—the caregiver's (and therapist's) metabolizing of raw emotional states into thinkable form. Object relations underwrites most modern psychodynamic work with personality pathology.

Self psychology (Kohut) reframed narcissistic disturbance as deficit rather than conflict—failures of early empathic mirroring leaving an unstable self—and made sustained empathic immersion the core technique, softening the tradition's interpretive austerity.

Attachment theory (Bowlby, Ainsworth, Main) supplied the tradition's empirical spine: rigorous developmental science demonstrating that early caregiving patterns produce measurable, internally carried attachment strategies that predict later relating—vindicating the internalization premise with prospective data, and yielding, in Fonagy's mentalization construct (the capacity to understand behavior in terms of mental states), the tradition's most productive modern research program.

The interpersonal and relational turns (Sullivan; later Mitchell and relational psychoanalysis) recast treatment as a two-person field: the therapist is a participant, not a blank screen; enactments—the dyad's joint unconscious choreography—are inevitable and informative; and authority in the room is shared. This sensibility now pervades mainstream practice.

From open-ended art to testable treatments

The decisive modern development is the engineering of psychodynamic therapy into specifiable, trainable, trial-ready forms. Brief dynamic therapies (Malan's focal therapy; Davanloo's intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy, ISTDP; Luborsky's supportive-expressive therapy built on the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme; Strupp's time-limited dynamic psychotherapy) demonstrated that dynamic work could be focused and time-limited. Manualized treatments for personality disorder—Kernberg's transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) and Bateman and Fonagy's mentalization-based treatment (MBT)—entered randomized trials against strong comparators. Structured short-term protocols for depression (dynamic interpersonal therapy, DIT; Lemma, Target, Fonagy) entered public health systems including England's NHS. The tradition that once disdained measurement now sustains a genuine, if smaller, trial literature—Section 7's subject.

The Theoretical Model

Unconscious process, conflict, and compromise

The model's core claims, stated in contemporary terms: mental life is massively parallel and mostly non-conscious (a point modern cognitive science concedes, while disputing the dynamic—motivated—character psychoanalysis ascribes to it); the mind routinely wants incompatible things (closeness and safety, ambition and loyalty, anger and love toward the same person); and symptoms, inhibitions, and character traits frequently function as compromise formations—the best available settlement among a wish, the fear it arouses, and the defense against both. Clinically, this converts the symptom from a malfunction to be deleted into a sentence to be read: the panic that erupts as a controlling parent dies; the promotion self-sabotaged each time success approaches; the partner choices that recreate, with uncanny precision, the original injury.

Defense

Defense mechanisms are the mind's automatic strategies for keeping unbearable mental content out of awareness. Vaillant's empirically grounded hierarchy orders them by maturity—from psychotic (denial of external reality) through immature (projection, acting out, splitting), neurotic (repression, displacement, reaction formation, intellectualization), to mature (humor, sublimation, suppression, altruism)—with longitudinal data (the Harvard Grant Study) linking defense maturity to long-term health and life outcomes. Dynamic therapy reads a person partly through their defensive repertoire, and treats defenses with respect: they are interpreted when their cost exceeds their protection, and never stripped faster than the patient can bear what they cover.

Transference, countertransference, enactment

Transference—the patient's importation of internalized relational templates into the relationship with the therapist—is the tradition's distinctive clinical resource: the presenting pattern does not have to be reconstructed from report, because it walks into the room. The patient who experiences every authority as contemptuous will, soon enough, experience the therapist that way—and for once the other party can notice it, decline the assigned role, and examine the script with the patient in real time. Countertransference—the therapist's evoked responses—is read as a sample of what others feel around this patient (the bored therapist, the rescuing therapist, the walking-on-eggshells therapist), disciplined by the therapist's own treatment, supervision, and self-scrutiny. Enactments, the inevitable moments when both parties are drawn into the old drama before either notices, are treated as the pattern made flesh: potentially the most mutative events in a treatment, if survived and understood.

Development and the internalized past

The developmental premise—early relational experience builds the templates—now rests on attachment research rather than on reconstruction alone. Its clinical use is forward-facing: not whom to blame, but what model of self-and-other this person carries, what it cost to build, and what experiences—including the therapy relationship itself—might revise it. The mechanism of revision is contested within the tradition (insight through interpretation versus new relational experience—the old debate over the "corrective emotional experience") and the honest modern answer is both, in proportions that vary by patient.

How Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Is Used

The supportive–expressive spectrum

Dynamic technique is calibrated along a spectrum. Expressive (insight-oriented) work—interpretation of defense and transference, tolerance of anxiety in session, minimal reassurance—suits patients with sufficient ego strength: the capacity to observe themselves, tolerate affect, and use a relationship without being destabilized by it. Supportive work uses the same model of the mind to opposite tactical ends: strengthening defenses rather than interpreting them, lending the therapist's reality-testing and problem-solving, containing rather than uncovering—the indicated mode for fragile, crisis-burdened, or severely ill patients. Most real treatments move flexibly along the spectrum, and knowing when not to interpret is considered as much a competence as interpretation itself.

Indications

Sensible modern claims, keyed to the evidence in Section 7:

• Depression, where short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (STPP) is an evidence-supported option broadly comparable to other bona fide treatments, and long-term work has specific trial support in chronic and treatment-resistant presentations (the Tavistock study).
• Personality disorders — the tradition's strongest contemporary claim: TFP and MBT for borderline personality disorder hold their own against active comparators in randomized trials, and dynamic therapy is among the few traditions with tested treatments for narcissistic and mixed personality pathology.
• Anxiety disorders — manualized panic-focused psychodynamic psychotherapy (Milrod) has positive RCTs; for social anxiety, the large SOPHO-NET trial found dynamic therapy effective though CBT modestly superior on some outcomes. Where strong exposure-based protocols exist, they generally remain first-line; dynamic therapy is a reasonable second line or preference-based alternative.
• Somatic symptom and functional disorders — STPP (including ISTDP and emotion-focused variants) has a respectable trial record in functional somatic syndromes, IBS, and medically unexplained symptoms.
• Complex, comorbid, and relational presentations — the recurrent life-pattern problems, chronic interpersonal dysfunction, and "the diagnosis doesn't capture it" cases for which symptom-protocol therapy was not designed; here dynamic therapy functions less as a rival to CBT than as the treatment for what remains after CBT has done what it does.
• Eating disorders, complicated grief, and trauma-related presentations with significant developmental components, usually integrated with stabilization and behavioral elements.

It is not a primary treatment for psychotic disorders, bipolar disorder, OCD, or acute severe states requiring stabilization; classical insight work is contraindicated where it outpaces a patient's capacity to bear it.

Formats, frequency, duration

Short-term dynamic therapy runs roughly 12–40 weekly sessions around a circumscribed focus (a core conflictual relationship theme, a panic dynamic, a grief). Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (LTPP) runs a year or more, once or twice weekly, for personality pathology, chronic depression, and complex presentations. Group, couple, family, child (play-therapy-based), and inpatient/day-hospital (notably MBT's original format) variants exist. Assessment and formulation are structured in modern practice—operationalized systems (OPD; the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, PDM-2; Kernberg's structural interview) assess defense level, identity integration, mentalizing capacity, and relational themes, and the formulation drives the supportive–expressive calibration and the treatment focus.

Common Practices and Techniques

The frame. Fixed times, consistent setting, clear boundaries, stable fees and policies—not administrative trivia but part of the treatment: a reliable structure against which the patient's patterns (lateness, cancellations, boundary tests) become visible and discussable, and a container that makes deep work safe.

Open-ended exploration. The dynamic descendant of free association: sessions begin where the patient begins; the therapist follows affect, watches for shifts, gaps, and detours, and listens with what Freud called evenly hovering attention—tracking not only the story but the telling: what is glossed, when the voice flattens, which topics reliably change the subject.

Clarification, confrontation, interpretation. The classical intervention sequence. Clarification gathers and sharpens what the patient has said; confrontation (gentler than the word: pointing out, juxtaposing) draws attention to something avoided or contradictory—"you mention your father's death in passing and move straight to logistics"; interpretation offers a hypothesis linking surface to depth: the defense, the feeling under it, the pattern it serves, eventually its origins and its appearance in the transference. Modern craft norms: interpretations are offered as conjectures to be examined, timed to the patient's nearness to the insight, and aimed first at defense and affect before genetic (childhood) content; the heroic deep interpretation of caricature is poor technique by the tradition's own standards.

Work in the transference. Noticing and taking up the relationship itself: "I notice you've apologized to me three times today—what do you imagine I'm feeling toward you?" The here-and-now relational episode is linked to the outside pattern and, where useful, to its history (Malan's triangle of insight: therapist–current others–past figures). TFP systematizes this for borderline patients, organizing the entire treatment around the oscillating self–other representations as they appear toward the therapist.

Working through. The unglamorous center of dynamic treatment: a pattern seen once is not a pattern relinquished; it must be encountered, recognized, and chosen against across many contexts and months. This—not the dramatic single insight—is what the tradition means by depth, and it is the honest rationale for dynamic therapy's longer durations.

Dreams, fantasy, and the non-rational. Still used, shorn of dictionary symbolism: the dream as the patient's own imagery for what cannot yet be said directly, explored associatively.

Use of countertransference and repair. The therapist's evoked experience, disclosed sparingly or used silently to orient; ruptures in the alliance treated as enactments to be repaired and understood—rupture-and-repair being among the better-evidenced relational change processes in psychotherapy research generally.

Termination as treatment. Endings are planned, anticipated, and worked—loss, gratitude, disappointment, and the revival of old separations—on the premise that how a person leaves is part of what they learn.

Psychodynamic Therapy Among Its Neighbors

Versus CBT. The deepest practical differences: unit of analysis (relational-emotional patterns vs. cognitions/behaviors), session structure (open vs. agenda-driven), stance toward the relationship (instrument of treatment vs. alliance backdrop), change theory (insight + new relational experience + working through vs. skills + disconfirmation), and time horizon. The traditions also borrow more than either advertises: schema therapy is object relations in CBT clothing; behavioral activation's anti-rumination matches dynamic suspicion of intellectualization; and Beck trained as an analyst—the thought record is the analysis of automatic mental content, democratized.

Versus IPT. Interpersonal therapy is dynamic therapy's pragmatic grandchild: interpersonal focus retained, unconscious and transference work removed, protocolized for depression. Where IPT suffices, it is faster; where the pattern is characterological, it tends not to.

Versus existential therapy. Shared depth, relationship-centrality, and anti-protocol sensibility; different depths—conflict and internalized relationships versus the givens of existence. In practice the traditions blend readily (Yalom is the blend).

Versus DBT/MBT for borderline personality. The live clinical choice: DBT's skills-and-structure versus MBT's mentalizing focus versus TFP's transference work. Trials find all beat unstructured care and rarely each other (the generalist-treatment finding from the DBT document applies symmetrically here); selection in practice follows severity of behavioral dyscontrol (favoring DBT initially), availability, and patient fit.

The Research Evidence

The short-term literature

The meta-analytic picture for short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy has consolidated over two decades (Leichsenring, Abbass, Driessen, Cuijpers, Steinert and colleagues): STPP outperforms control conditions for depression, anxiety, and somatic symptom disorders with moderate-to-large effects, and—the central finding—performs equivalently to other bona fide treatments including CBT. Steinert et al.'s 2017 equivalence meta-analysis (23 RCTs against gold-standard comparators, mostly CBT) found differences within the prespecified equivalence margin across outcomes. Cochrane's review of STPP for common mental disorders reached compatible conclusions with the customary caveats about heterogeneity and trial quality. A repeatedly observed pattern across this literature: dynamic therapy's effects are maintained or increase after termination—the "sleeper effect"—consistent with the claim that the treatment builds capacities that keep working; skeptics note this pattern is vulnerable to attrition and regression artifacts, and it should be stated as suggestive rather than proven.

Personality disorders

The tradition's strongest modern trial base. MBT: Bateman and Fonagy's partial-hospital RCT in BPD showed large advantages over usual treatment, with an extraordinary 8-year follow-up maintaining differences in suicidality, service use, and functioning; outpatient MBT replicated against structured clinical management (advantages on several outcomes, more modest). TFP: Clarkin's three-arm trial found TFP comparable to DBT on most outcomes (with signals on anger and attachment-related change), and Doering's trial found TFP superior to community treatment by experienced therapists. Cristea's 2017 meta-analysis of BPD psychotherapies found psychodynamic treatments and DBT both effective with no clear winner. For mixed and avoidant personality pathology, and (in early trials) narcissistic presentations, dynamic treatments are among the few with any controlled evidence.

Long-term therapy and the hard questions

Leichsenring and Rabung's 2008 JAMA meta-analysis claimed large advantages of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy over shorter treatments in complex disorders; it drew immediate, severe methodological criticism (Littell, Bhar, Beck and others—heterogeneous comparisons, effect-size computation errors, inclusion of non-randomized studies), and its revised versions show smaller, more contested advantages. The fairer evidence for long-term work is specific: the Tavistock Adult Depression Study randomized chronic, treatment-resistant depression to 18 months of weekly dynamic therapy versus usual care—no difference at treatment end, but significantly better partial-remission and depression outcomes across two further years of follow-up, the sleeper pattern under randomized conditions. The Helsinki Psychotherapy Study's long naturalistic-randomized hybrid found short-term therapies faster and long-term therapy ahead at three years, with psychoanalysis showing further gains only on very long horizons—informative, but design-limited. Honest summary: long-term dynamic therapy has some randomized support in chronic/complex presentations; claims of general superiority over briefer treatment outrun the data.

Mechanism

Process research supports several tradition-specific claims: gains in insight/self-understanding and reflective functioning (mentalizing) predict and in several studies mediate outcome; accurate interpretation of the patient's core relational theme correlates with benefit; and defense maturation accompanies recovery. As elsewhere in this series, mediators move in rival therapies too, and the decisive dismantling studies largely do not exist.

Criticisms and Controversies

The inheritance problem

Psychodynamic therapy carries the liabilities of its ancestry. Classical psychoanalysis earned the unfalsifiability charge (Popper) and the evidential critique (Grünbaum): a theory in which disagreement is resistance and contrary evidence is defense risks explaining everything and predicting nothing. Freud scholarship (Crews and others) has documented misrepresented cases and constructed evidence at the founding. The modern field's defenses are real—core constructs reformulated testably (attachment, mentalizing, defense hierarchies), manualized treatments submitted to trials, adversarial collaboration with academic psychology—but uneven: parts of the practicing community still treat doctrine as settled and outcome measurement as philistinism, and patients cannot easily tell which kind of practitioner they have found.

The recovered-memory catastrophe

The gravest harm associated with the broad tradition: the 1980s–90s recovered-memory movement, in which suggestive techniques built on repression doctrine produced false memories of abuse, shattered families, and wrongful prosecutions. Mainstream psychodynamic practice today disavows memory-recovery work, and memory science (Loftus) is standard training content—but the episode is a permanent caution about what theory-driven certainty plus suggestion can do, and any website discussion of "uncovering the past" should be written with it in mind.

Evidence asymmetries

Granting the equivalence findings, asymmetries remain: the dynamic trial base is a fraction of CBT's in volume; average trial quality is lower and allegiance effects run in both directions; for several disorders with decisive specific protocols (OCD, panic, PTSD, insomnia) dynamic therapy has thin or no comparative evidence and should not be first-line; the sleeper effect and the LTPP-superiority claims are suggestive, contested, and promotionally overused; and equivalence cuts both ways—nothing in the data justifies choosing dynamic therapy over CBT on efficacy grounds either, leaving the honest selection criteria as fit, focus, availability, and patient preference.

Cost, duration, and access

Open-ended therapy at private-pay rates is structurally inaccessible to most patients, concentrating the tradition demographically and inviting the fair question of opportunity cost: for many presentations, equivalent symptomatic outcomes are available in a quarter of the time. The tradition's best answers are its brief and protocolized forms (STPP, DIT, MBT in public systems) and the argument—supported but not proven—that for chronic relational pathology the longer dose is the effective dose.

Therapist-dependence and harm potential

A treatment whose instrument is the therapist's own mind varies with the instrument. Poorly conducted dynamic therapy has recognizable failure modes: interpretation as one-upmanship; fostered dependency and interminable treatment without review; boundary erosion in a method that deliberately intensifies the relationship; archaeology displacing the patient's present life. The tradition's safeguards—personal therapy, intensive supervision, frame discipline—are genuine but unevenly enforced, and the field has historically under-measured its harms (a criticism it shares with all psychotherapy, but with higher stakes given treatment intensity and duration).

Cultural and conceptual critiques

The classical theory universalized the family structure and inner life of a particular time, place, and class; feminist and cross-cultural critiques of its founding content are largely conceded. The contemporary version—attachment-and-relationally based—travels better but still centers an introspective, verbal, individualist mode of help; adaptations exist, the literature documenting them is young.

What Patients Can Expect, and Practical Considerations

What sessions feel like. Less structured than anything else in this series: the patient leads, silences are allowed to do their work, and the therapist's questions move toward feeling, pattern, and the relationship itself—including direct discussion of how the patient experiences the therapist. No worksheets; the homework is a life examined between sessions. Expect the early phase to be disorienting for patients accustomed to agendas, and expect the therapy at times to be uncomfortable in a specific way: the patterns under examination will show up in the treatment, on schedule.

Duration and review. Brief focal work: roughly 12–40 sessions. Characterological and chronic presentations: a year or more, once or twice weekly. A modern, defensible practice norm regardless of length: explicit goals, periodic progress review (measurement-based care is compatible with dynamic work, whatever older custom said), and a planned rather than drifting termination. Absence of any movement by several months is grounds for reformulation or referral, not for the explanation that resistance is being analyzed.

Combination with medication and other treatment. Routine and uncontroversial in modern practice; the dynamic frame adds attention to the meanings of medication (rescue, defeat, control) that often determine adherence. Sequencing with symptom-focused therapy is common in both directions: stabilization or CBT first, dynamic work for what remains; or dynamic work that ends with a targeted behavioral phase.

Finding qualified care. Markers: full clinical licensure plus formal psychodynamic/psychoanalytic training (institute training, accredited psychotherapy fellowships, or certification through bodies such as the American Psychoanalytic Association/APsA-affiliated institutes); for personality-disorder treatment, specific TFP or MBT training.

Conclusion

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is the tradition the rest of this series quietly presupposes: it built the modern facts of the field—the talking cure itself, the therapeutic relationship as instrument, defense, transference, the developmental shaping of character—and its descendants' fingerprints are on every other document here, from schema work to rupture-repair research. Its contemporary form has done what its critics demanded: specified its treatments, entered randomized trials, and earned an evidence base that supports equivalence with CBT for common disorders, leadership alongside DBT in personality pathology, and a uniquely suggestive record of post-termination gains. What the evidence does not support is nostalgia: the trial base remains comparatively thin, the founding theory's authority is spent, the recovered-memory disaster is part of the permanent record, and open-ended treatment without goals or review is indefensible in 2026. The defensible position for a psychiatric practice: psychodynamic therapy as a first-class option chosen for fit—for relational and characterological problems, chronic and treatment-resistant depression, and the patient whose question is not only "how do I stop feeling this?" but "why do I keep doing this?"—delivered in its modern, formulated, measured form, by clinicians trained to use the relationship without being used by it.

Selected References and Further Reading

1. Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98–109.
2. Blagys, M.D., & Hilsenroth, M.J. (2000). Distinctive features of short-term psychodynamic-interpersonal psychotherapy: A review of the comparative psychotherapy process literature. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 7(2), 167–188.
3. Gabbard, G.O. (2014). Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
4. McWilliams, N. (2011). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
5. Summers, R.F., & Barber, J.P. (2010). Psychodynamic Therapy: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice. Guilford Press.
6. Steinert, C., Munder, T., Rabung, S., Hoyer, J., & Leichsenring, F. (2017). Psychodynamic therapy: As efficacious as other empirically supported treatments? A meta-analysis testing equivalence of outcomes. American Journal of Psychiatry, 174(10), 943–953.
7. Driessen, E., et al. (2015). The efficacy of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression: A meta-analysis update. Clinical Psychology Review, 42, 1–15.
8. Abbass, A.A., et al. (2014). Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapies for common mental disorders. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Issue 7, CD004687.
9. Leichsenring, F., & Rabung, S. (2008). Effectiveness of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy: A meta-analysis. JAMA, 300(13), 1551–1565. [Critique: Littell, J.H., & Shlonsky, A. (2011), and Bhar, S.S., et al. (2010).]
10. Fonagy, P., et al. (2015). Pragmatic randomized controlled trial of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: The Tavistock Adult Depression Study (TADS). World Psychiatry, 14(3), 312–321.
11. Bateman, A., & Fonagy, P. (2008). 8-year follow-up of patients treated for borderline personality disorder: Mentalization-based treatment versus treatment as usual. American Journal of Psychiatry, 165(5), 631–638.
12. Clarkin, J.F., Levy, K.N., Lenzenweger, M.F., & Kernberg, O.F. (2007). Evaluating three treatments for borderline personality disorder: A multiwave study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(6), 922–928.
13. Cristea, I.A., et al. (2017). Efficacy of psychotherapies for borderline personality disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry, 74(4), 319–328.
14. Milrod, B., et al. (2007). A randomized controlled clinical trial of psychoanalytic psychotherapy for panic disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(2), 265–272.
15. Leichsenring, F., et al. (2013). Psychodynamic therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy in social anxiety disorder: A multicenter randomized controlled trial. American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(7), 759–767.
16. Vaillant, G.E. (1992). Ego Mechanisms of Defense. American Psychiatric Press.
17. Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E.L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self. Other Press.
18. Crews, F. (2017). Freud: The Making of an Illusion. Metropolitan Books.
19. Loftus, E.F., & Ketcham, K. (1994). The Myth of Repressed Memory. St. Martin's Press.
20. Lemma, A., Target, M., & Fonagy, P. (2011). Brief Dynamic Interpersonal Therapy: A Clinician's Guide. Oxford University Press.