Effectiveness of Long-term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Meta-analysis

Effectiveness of Long-term Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A Meta-analysis is a work by Falk Leichsenring (2008).

Core claims

• Leichsenring and Rabung’s JAMA meta-analysis demonstrates that long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (LTPP) is significantly more effective than shorter forms of therapy for complex mental disorders — personality disorders, chronic depression, multiple comorbid conditions, and treatment-resistant anxiety.
• The study establishes that LTPP produces large effect sizes (Cohen’s d = 0.96–1.46) for overall effectiveness, target problems, and personality functioning, with the largest effects appearing precisely in the domain that short-term treatments most struggle with: structural personality change.
• Published in one of medicine’s most prestigious journals, the paper broke the institutional silence around long-term psychodynamic treatment, providing the evidence base that clinicians needed to justify extended analytic work to insurers, institutions, and skeptical colleagues.

Related questions

• Does the finding that LTPP produces its largest effects in personality functioning provide empirical support for the Jungian claim that genuine psychological transformation requires work at the level of the Self rather than symptom management at the level of the ego?
• How should the depth psychological community interpret the fact that this evidence was published in JAMA — does the venue represent a genuine opening in mainstream medicine’s stance toward psychodynamic work, or was it an anomaly that the field has since absorbed without structural change?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-clinic/leichsenring-effectiveness-long-term-psychodynamic/

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