Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-23-2024

Abstract

The scientific literature focused on the categorization of therapists’ interventions in clinical sessions, and their effects on patients, is not very extensive and often autoreferential. The most relevant findings clearly show the eclecticism of clinicians, grounding only 10–14% of their interventions on the specific theoretical approach to which they belong. Despite that, a trans-theoretical systematization of clinical interventions is lacking. The present work aims to verify the feasibility of a trans-theoretical categorization of clinical interventions based on Dynamical Systems Research in psychotherapy (DSR). For this purpose, the authors present the results of three literature reviews. The first sections of this paper present the literature on the historical development of clinical interventions within the psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral approaches. In the fourth section, the review of the DSR literature in psychotherapy and the systematization of clinical interventions according to such a unifying framework are introduced. Clinical interventions can be aimed at increasing the patient’s stability and flexibility, with the final objective of promoting H-L Synchronization and S-F Oscillations. The connections between the DSR-based categorization and the literature pertaining to the psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral approaches are highlighted. Finally, in the conclusions, the limitations and potential developments of this scientific area are discussed.

Comments

This article was originally published in Psychiatry International, volume 5, in 2024. https://doi.org/10.3390/psychiatryint5040054

Copyright

The authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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