ABSTRACT
V. Robin Weersing, in an elegant and deceptively straightforward presentation of the most challenging issue in psychotherapy research, offers a worrying portrayal of psychological therapy services. This chapter discusses the general problems of research on psychotherapy for depression in young people and then consider ways in which psychoanalytic clinical work might benefit from Weersing's analysis, as well as perhaps casting some further light on the findings she reports. The treatment given by the specialized depression clinic at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic (WPIC) is almost as effective as laboratory-based studies. Work to identify generic features of psychotherapy has tended to concern itself with the attempt to find common mutative components across psychosocial treatments, such as creating hope, offering a secure attachment relationship, enhancing interpersonal understanding, and so on. The evidence from the recent European multi-site study of Trowell and colleagues demonstrates that when manualized and supervised, psychodynamic psychotherapy is very effective with complex and severe clinical cases.
