Enlivening Psychodynamic Brief Therapy with Emotion-Focused Interventions: An Integrative Therapist’s Approach

Abstract

Focusing on affect and the expression of emotion has long been a key feature of psychodynamic psychotherapies. While psychodynamically-oriented therapists have always paid attention to the emotional life of their clients, they usually do not focus on accessing and processing emotions in the manner and to the degree that emotion-focused therapists do. By recognizing the power of emotion as a fundamental change mechanism, an increasing number of therapists who previously defined themselves a classically psychodynamic (e.g., fostering insight through interpretation) are now placing themselves in the “experiential camp.” Developed in the 1980′s, Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy (TLDP) has undergone several changes. One of these is to emphasize experiential learning as a main therapeutic change agent. In this updated version of TLDP, there is a focus on accessing feelings in the here–and-now that are seen as altering and even transforming old dysfunctional patterns of relating to self and others. To provide examples of what such interventions might look like in an integrative psychodynamically-oriented therapy, excerpts from transcripts of actual TLDP sessions will be provided. In particular, vignettes will illustrate accessing and processing emotion relevant for understanding and shifting a client’s cyclical maladaptive pattern and “working through.”