Introduction

This book concentrates on short term psychodynamic psychotherapy. It aims to discover and analyse the key principles involved. It aims to enrich the understanding of an approach to therapy that is already of benefit to many in our community but that could reach very many others if it were better known and understood. There is currently a gap in awareness and knowledge about the approach. The focal and short term psychodynamic model is not being advocated as the method of therapy but as a method of therapy. It is not the only method of brief therapy that is being practised today but it is the only approach that is to be studied here. My concern here is not for example, about Cognitive Analytical Therapy as advocated by Anthony Ryle or Solution Focused Therapy as expounded by Steve de Shazer, which are two of the better known contemporary brief therapies. It is not my intention, to be arguing the case for the efficacy of this model over and against other models of therapy, whether brief or longer term, it is simply to respond to the question: What is short term psychodynamic therapy? This is a question that I have very often been asked and in order to answer this question in a way that the model could be accepted as an authentic method of 2practice, it needed to be more than simply the way my colleagues and I practised. It needed to be rooted within a tradition and be seen to link with the work of other professionals acknowledged as experts in the field. It needed to be examined in sufficient detail to reveal its constituent parts. I decided to undertake such an examination using my own casework and that of colleagues as the starting point.