The client-counselor match and the corrective emotional experience: Evidence from interpersonal and attachment research.

Abstract

Models of brief psychodynamic therapy posit the corrective emotional experience as a key factor in therapeutic change. Although widely taught and used, these models do not have strong empirical support. This article proposes the client–counselor match as a facilitating condition for a corrective emotional experience and reviews the relevant evidence from attachment and interpersonal research. Overall, the notion of the corrective emotional experience has received some support from attachment research, which looks at complementarity of styles at the personality level. Interpersonal research, rather, considers complementarity of actual exchanges in therapy and has yielded mixed results. It thus appears that the validity of the corrective experience has yet to be established, notably through the use of a more fine-grained approach. One of the most famous yet controversial claims ever made in the psychotherapy literature is that of Luborsky, Singer, and Luborsky (1975), who suggested that all psychotherapies produce somewhat equivalent outcomes. Empirical research has since repeatedly tried to challenge this assertion; a host of studies have searched for individual dispositions of both client and therapist that may have contributed to Luborsky et al.’s null findings. At least 175 categories of client characteristics and 40 therapist traits have been studied as potential predictors of treatment effectiveness (Beutler, 1991), and it has been suggested that the client–counselor match accounts for a greater portion of the outcome than does any single characteristic of the client or of the counselor. The interaction between the two partners’ personal characteristics has thus become a focus in recent counseling literature (Beutler, 1991; Nelson & Neufeldt, 1996; Reis & Brown, 1999; Talley, Strupp, & Morey, 1990). The basic assumptions of at least two major theoretical fields converge to suggest that the interpersonal orientation of each partner is the key to understanding the client–counselor match: attachment theory (Bowlby, 1973, 1980, 1982, 1988) and interpersonal theory (Kiesler, 1982a, 1996; Sullivan, 1953a, 1953b). Both these theories assert that opposite or contrasting interpersonal orientations in the therapist and client are optimal for the process and the outcome of the treatment relationship, by virtue of the corrective emotional experience (Alexander & French, 1946, p. 294) they provide to the client. A corrective emotional experience is an experiential relearning through which the client can safely alter his or her rigid relational patterns by being exposed to new interpersonal experiences with the therapist (Teyber, 2000). This is consistent with the core propositions of short-term psychoAnnie Bernier and Mary Dozier, Department of Psychology, University of Delaware. This study was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Annie Bernier, PhD, who is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, C. P. 6128, succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3J7, Canada. E-mail: abernier@udel.edu PROD #: 108015