Studies involving patients with personality disorders (PD) have not focused on improvement of core aspects of the PD. This paper examines changes in quality of object relations, interpersonal problems, psychological mindedness, and personality traits in a sample of 156 patients with DSM-IV PD diagnoses being randomized to either manualized or non manualized dynamic psychotherapy. Effect sizes adjusted for symptomatic change and reliable change indices were calculated. We found that both treatments were equally effective at reducing personality pathology. Only in neuroticism did the non manualized group do better during the follow-up period. The largest improvement was found in quality of object relations. For the remaining variables only small and clinically insignificant magnitudes of change were found.The prevalence of personality disorders (PD) among psychiatric patients ranges between 31 -45 % (Samuels et al., 2002). Psychotherapeutic treatment in general and dynamic therapy in particular has increasingly shifted from a long term to briefer time formats. As a result, the focus of brief dynamic psychotherapies has shifted from restructuring personality
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NIH Public AccessAuthor Manuscript Psychotherapy (Chic). Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 September 1.
NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript pathology to a focus on symptom reduction. For these briefer treatments, however, there is so far no substantial evidence for their capacity to reduce character pathology.A comprehensive meta-analysis of 25 clinical trials with patients with PD (Leichsenring & Leibing, 2003) indicated that most studies had focused on symptomatic measures such as the Symptom Check List-90 (SCL-90, Derogatis, 1997), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, Beck & Steer, 1988), and Global Adjustment Scale (GAS, First, Spitzer, & Gibbon, 1997). Few of these studies included measures assessing core PD pathology. For example, interpersonal problems, often considered a major aspect of PD pathology, were assessed in only two psychodynamic studies (Bateman & Fonagy, 2001Muran, Safran, Samstag, & Winston, 2005). Furthermore, measures theoretically relevant to the goals of psychodynamic psychotherapy (e.g., reflective functioning and levels or forms of attachment) have surprisingly rarely been used (for an exception see Levy et al., 2006).Improving maladaptive personality functioning is of considerable importance for patients with PD. Crits-Christoph and Barbe...