ABSTRACT
For historical reasons psychotherapy in Germany has a very specific tradition. Part of this tradition is the great importance placed on inpatient psychotherapy. Genuine psychotherapeutic hospitals had already been founded in Germany even before the Second World War, and after the War numerous psychotherapeutic hospitals were added to these, as well as several hospitals for psychotherapeutic and psychosomatic rehabilitation. Research on inpatient psychodynamic group work has focused on various questions during the last years namely, the investigation of its global effectiveness, the subjective importance of single components of the inpatient programme for the patients, the study of therapeutic factors, and process research. The working group has primarily focused on the question of how the patients’ experience of their interpersonal problems, as assessed by the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, can predict the outcome of group treatment. The interpersonal model, which has its origins in the psychoanalytic literature, has been shown to be relevant for describing human behaviour in psychotherapy.
