Common interventions in two single cases of cognitive and psychoanalytic psychotherapies

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the interventions used in two nonmanualized psychotherapeutic treatments-one cognitive and one psychoanalytically oriented-; assessing the theoretical framework's pervasiveness in terms of the specificity of the interventions implemented by the psychotherapists. Our purpose was to observe which proportion of the therapists' interventions were directly associated with their theoretical background, and which proportion of them represented common, nonspecific or specific interventions. For this research, 29 sessions from a psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic treatment and 15 sessions from a cognitive psychotherapeutic treatment (both audio-recorded and transcribed), were analyzed. The classifications of psychotherapeutic interventions developed by Roussos, Etchebarne, and Waizmann (2005; Roussos, Waizmann, and Etchebarne, 2003) were used in order to characterize the interventions. Results show that both treatments were highly impregnated by nonspecific interventions. Only an average of 17% of the interventions in the psychoanalytic treatment and a 16% in the cognitive treatment, were specific of the theoretical frameworks.