No abstract

This is an effectiveness study of treatment outcome that relies on patients' perception of their mental health during and after psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Ninety-nine outpatients attending the IPTAR Clinical Center (ICC) responded to the Effectiveness Questionnaire (EQ) adapted from that developed by Consumer Reports. Effectiveness is studied from various perspectives. Findings indicated (1) an incremental gain in effectiveness scores from six to over twenty-four months of therapy; (2) an incremental gain with greater session frequency from one to two or three weekly sessions; (3) facilitation of effectiveness by the experience of a positive relationship with the therapist; (4) an interplay between clinical syndrome and treatment conditions. A method giving clinical validity to the quantitative findings is described. Brief summaries of two recorded interviews reveal differential reconstruction of events that had occurred during treatment. The findings are discussed from the vantage point of two hypotheses: cognitive dissonance and internalization of therapeutic experience.

Kinetic behavior was evaluated by a scoring system of object-and body-focused hand movements and observed in 24 female college students, 12 field independent (F-I) and 12 field dependent (F-D). The 5s were observed under three videotaped interview conditions: cold association, warm association, and warm interchange. Gestural behavior distinguished F-I and F-D groups within each of the three conditions: during cold association, F-D 5s engaged in more hand-to-hand body-focused movements (p < .05); during warm association, F-D-5s again had more such movements (p < .005); and during warm interchange, they had more objectfocused motor-primacy gestures (p < .025). Certain nonhand-to-hand bodyfocused movements were unrelated to psychological differentiation, yet were induced by negative interpersonal contact (cold condition). Certain forms of kinetic behavior are governed by cognitive style; others may reflect the unverbalized experiences of the relationship.

This paper presents a scheme, derived both rationally and empirically, for the analysis of body movements occurring spontaneously in psychotherapeutic interviews. Focussing on hand movements, a distinction is made between two broad, conceptually different, and independent classes of movements: those accompanying speech (object-focussed), and those involving some form of self-stimulation but not speech-related (body-focussed). Furthermore, different kinds of object-focussed movements are identified according to their integration with and primacy vis-a-vis speech. Observations on two paranoid patients, each at two different points in his treatment, suggest that the coding scheme can reflect the patient's altered clinical states.