ABSTRACT
It is a pleasure to have been invited to discuss the presentation of Mary Goulding. The work that she and Bob Goulding have done over the years in evolving their particular approach to therapy has received widespread and deserved recognition. What fascinates me as a student of the psychotherapeutic process, one who has devoted much of his professional life to trying to understand and recognize the common denominators that enable various forms of psychotherapy to be more or less equally effective with their patients, is trying to see how much of the Gouldings’ method can be translated into terms that I have defined over the years as being essential ingredients in the psychotherapeutic process. My interest in the Gouldings’ work is further enhanced by my own interest in shortening the length of the psychotherapeutic process, and in the work I have done in recent years with short-term dynamic psychotherapy.
