ABSTRACT
Psychotherapeutic approaches termed “psychodynamic” proceed on the assumption that feeling, thinking, and acting is influenced by unconscious drives, motivations, fantasies, and interactional experiences. Sigmund Freud, the doyen of psychoanalysis and initiator of whole range of modern psychotherapeutic approaches based on it, frequently engaged in psychotherapeutic counselling and short-term therapies. Central to the therapeutic proposals made by F. Alexander and T. M. French was the idea of “therapeutic flexibility”. They suggested sessions of different frequency depending on individual needs, longer or shorter intervals in the overall course of treatment, and combinations with other forms of therapy. Focal therapy has attained classical status. It limits itself to working on a biographically conditioned conflict by means of its actualization in the patient-therapist relationship. Like psychoanalytic techniques, hermeneutic-creative intervention strategies seek to identify unconscious experience that, despite its significance and its effect on behaviour, is both unconscious and inaccessible to the individual, and to put it back at his or her disposal.
