Personality Styles And Brief Psychotherapy

Written for therapists working with people in distress, this book describes the links between crisis and personality style, and offers a plan for approaching cases with these connections in mind. The authors discuss ways to help patients learn new coping strategies, modify enduring attitudes, and improve their relational patterns. The chapters outline the history of brief dynamic psychotherapy, describe an approach focused on current stressors, apply configurational analysis to case formulation and review, and detail five personality types.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. The History of Brief Dynamic Psychotherapy 2. Our Approach to Brief Therapy: Focused on Current Stressors 3. Configurational Analysis: An Approach to Case Formulation and Review 4. The Hysterical Personality 5. The More Disturbed Hysterical Personality 6. The Compulsive Personality 7. The Narcissistic Personality 8. The Borderline Personality 9. Change in Brief Psychotherapy.

It is very difficult for the student or practitioner to find their way through the jungle of different personality typographies that has sprung up in the field of psychotherapy; and even harder for them to find a point of sufficient height above the forest canopy to get their bearings in order to compare one system with another. This volume offers such an observation point together with some possible mappings. It surveys how different schools of therapy approach a basic topic, the differences that exist between people - including their attitudes, feelings, concerns and talents. It examines different systematic and non-systematic approaches to identifying different types of human being, exploring whether there are systematic ways in which humans vary, how we can assess the merit of different typologies, and whether personality typing is a helpful approach to therapy. Character and Personality Types looks in detail at the arguments for and against the use of typologies of character and personality as a clinical tool; and offers general criteria for judging the merits of particular personality systems, as well as exploring the possibility of a wider synthesis.

Describes a clinician-patient relationship for the achievement of a wider range of safe emotional expression and mastery of previous traumas.

Object Relations Brief Therapy combines practical techniques with the depth of object relations theory, the wisdom of previous brief therapy writers, and, most notably, an emphasis on the unique therapeutic relationship. Often, therapists despair of doing any meaningful work in brief therapy. To this, Michael Stadter suggests the following pragmatic approach, 'think dynamically, address some underlying issue(s) and do what you can.' Specifically, the book emphasizes the depth of understanding of human experience that comes from an object relations perspective; the insight and experiential vitality of attention to the therapeutic relationship including its real, transferential, and countertransferential elements; the impact of the psychodynamic techniques that have been carefully studied and delineated by brief therapy writers such as Davanloo, Horowitz, Malan, Strupp, and Binder; and the flexibility of an eclectic approach that thoughtfully and selectively incorporates non-psychodynamic interventions. Therapists do not have to 'escape' managed care, according to Stadter. Rather, they need to learn how to deal with it in a way that preserves their integrity and enables them to practice the kind of healing psychotherapy they know how to do. In today's health care climate, Object Relations Brief Therapy is a much-needed guide for committed therapists. This new paperback edition includes a preface reviewing more recent developments in the area of brief therapy.

The last two decades have seen unprecedented increases in health care costs and, at the same time, encouraging progress in psychotherapy research. On the one hand, accountability, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency have now become commonplace terms for providers of mental health services whereas, on the other hand, an increasingly voluminous literature has emerged supporting the effectiveness of a number of types of psychotherapies. There now exists the possibility for the design and delivery of mental health services that-drawing upon this literature-more closely approximate empirically established data concerning the appropriateness and effectiveness of psychotherapy. The Handbook of the Brief Psychotherapies is intended to capture one major thrust of this movement: the development of a group of empirically grounded, time-limited therapies all sharing a common interest in the clinical utilization of a structured focus and an emphasis on time and action. For many years, professional self-interest, competing theoretical para digms, and the vagaries of practice, wisdom, and clinical myth have influenced the practice of psychotherapy. A critical questioning of the resulting, predomi nantly nondirective, open-ended, and global therapies has led to a growing emphasis on action-oriented, problem-focused, time-limited therapies. Yet, ironically, this interest in the brief psychotherapies has not so much involved a radical departure from traditional therapeutic modalities as it has emphasized a new pragmatism about how time, action, and structure operate in life as well as in therapy.

A tapestry of rich and varied perspectives drawn from a remarkable event. The Brief Therapy Congress, sponsored by the Milton H. Erickson Foundation, brought together over 2200 therapists and an impressive faculty that included J. Barber, J. Bergman, S. Budman, G. Cecchin, N. Cummings, S. de Shazer, A. Ellis, M. Goulding, J. Gustafson, J. Haley, C. Lankton, S. Lankton, A. Lazarus, C. Madanes, W. O'Hanlon, P. Papp, E. Polster, E. Rossi, P. Sifneos, H. Strupp, P. Watzlawick, J. Weakland, M. Yapko and many more.