Brief Dynamic Therapy Over Time

In Brief Dynamic Therapy Over Time, Dr. Hanna Levenson demonstrates how a time-efficient therapy can be brief and yet deep - how a short-term therapy can create long-term change. Time-limited dynamic psychotherapy, an empirically supported approach, is a form of brief dynamic therapy that originated within the object relations tradition. As used by Dr. Levenson, time-limited dynamic psychotherapy is an integrative model incorporating recent developments in attachment, experiential, relational, and systems approaches. This approach provides a specialized method for deriving a therapeutic focus that delineates the client's co-created, chronic, maladaptive ways of relating to others.

The goals of the therapy are to create corrective interpersonal experiences and new understandings designed to undermine this dysfunctional cyclical pattern. In this series of six sessions, Dr. Levenson works with a young woman who is very positive on the surface and who seems to be living a happy life. Working with the time-limited dynamic psychotherapy approach, it becomes apparent even in the first session that the client has suffered for years from depression; there are deep emotions that she has not expressed to anyone because she fears she will be abandoned if she does.

Dr. Levenson works with the client to help her experience and express her feelings within the sessions, and learn why she needed to suppress them earlier in life. As the therapy progresses, the client moves from hiding her emotions to sharing them, both in the session and with those closest to her.