The Meaning of Empirically Supported Treatment Research for Psychoanalytic and Other Long-Term Therapies

Two ways of evaluating the implications of empirically supported treatment research for psychoanalysis and other long-term therapies are considered. The first involves the comparison of the relative benefits of various psychotherapies; the second involves the comparison of short-term and long-term psychotherapies. The major findings are that (a) each of the different types of psychological treatments shows benefits, (b) the amount of benefits from each type of therapy shows mainly nonsignificant differences, (c) these nonsignificant differences are especially evident when the researcher's therapeutic allegiance is taken into account, (d) both short-term and long-term treatments show some positive benefits for some patients, and (e) there is a tendency for longer treatments to show more lasting benefits. The main gap in research studies consists of a lack of comparative studies of psychoanalysis versus other treatments. This review highlights the virtue of “methodological pluralism,” which means here applying to the same data a variety of methods for comparing psychotherapies with one another and for comparing long-term and short-term psychotherapies.