The Effectiveness of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Therapy: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies

The Effectiveness of Long-Term Psychoanalytic Therapy: A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies is a work by Saskia de Maat (2009).

Core claims

• De Maat and colleagues review 27 studies of long-term psychoanalytic therapy (multiple sessions per week, often lasting years) and find large pre-post effect sizes for both symptom reduction and personality change, establishing that classical psychoanalytic treatment produces substantial and durable outcomes.
• The review distinguishes between psychoanalytic therapy (one session per week) and psychoanalysis proper (three to five sessions per week), finding that higher-frequency treatment produces larger effects — a dose-response relationship that supports the clinical rationale for intensive analytic work.
• The paper’s most important finding is that the gains from psychoanalytic treatment are remarkably stable at long-term follow-up, with many studies showing continued improvement years after termination — confirming that analysis initiates a self-sustaining developmental process.

Related questions

• Does the dose-response relationship between session frequency and outcome support the Jungian premise that the unconscious requires sustained, repeated attention — that the dialogue between ego and unconscious cannot be rushed and deepens with the frequency of encounter?
• How does the finding of continued post-treatment improvement relate to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function — does analysis create a permanent capacity for self-regulation that persists independently of the therapeutic relationship?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-clinic/de-maat-effectiveness-long-term-psychoanalytic/

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