ABSTRACT
There is an enormous range of counselling help available to individuals, couples and families in Britain. Brief and time-limited counselling presents a challenge to practitioners, inviting them to refine, capture and offer the core of the complex activity. The major approaches have been classified broadly into psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural and tactical, the last derived primarily from systems-based family therapies. While there has been a growing interest in brief approaches to counselling and psychotherapy in the past decade, the quest for models that are both brief and effective has a longer history. Working to brief or time-limited contracts demands that the practitioner adopt a typically more interactive and proactive style. While Dry den and Feltham consider brief counselling unsuitable for people with chronic disturbances, personality disorders and serious mental-health problems, Ryle regards cognitive-analytic therapy to be suitable for clients with personality disorders or other serious disturbances to the self.
