ABSTRACT
As Sigmund Freud had predicted, the demand for therapeutic services has increased vastly and there are now many new contexts in which these are offered to a multitude of clients who expect free therapy, as he had envisaged after the First World War. Mann's twelve-session therapy model has proved itself as effective. It is easy to learn and widely practised. It makes use of an important methodological breakthrough to deal with the interminability of analysis. Serial therapy was first developed in the USA and called itself "Brief intermittent psychotherapy throughout the life cycle". The homing in on the most important diagnostic clues in the patient's material was developed by the Hungarian analyst Michael Balint at the Tavistock Institute in the 1950s. The focal therapy team Balint and Malan devised a method of following up their cases over a period of years after termination that was based on the traditional medical follow-up of a patient after discharge.
