The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy is a work by Jonathan Shedler (2010).

Core claims

• Shedler’s meta-analytic review demonstrates that psychodynamic psychotherapy produces effect sizes as large as those reported for CBT and other ‘evidence-based’ therapies, directly challenging the institutional narrative that psychodynamic approaches lack empirical support.
• The paper identifies a distinctive feature of psychodynamic treatment that other approaches rarely achieve: the therapeutic gains from psychodynamic therapy continue to grow after treatment ends, whereas CBT gains tend to plateau or diminish — suggesting that psychodynamic work initiates a self-sustaining process of psychological change.
• Shedler argues that the research literature has been systematically distorted by a methodological monoculture favoring manualized, short-term treatments that can be measured in randomized controlled trials, effectively rigging the evidence game against approaches whose mechanisms operate on longer timescales.

Related questions

• Does the finding that psychodynamic therapy gains continue to grow post-treatment support the Jungian concept of individuation as a self-perpetuating process — once initiated through authentic analytic work, the psyche continues its own development without ongoing clinical intervention?
• How does Shedler’s critique of the methodological monoculture in psychotherapy research relate to Hillman’s broader critique of literalism — is the insistence on RCTs as the sole gold standard itself a form of psychological literalism that cannot see what it cannot measure?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-clinic/shedler-efficacy-psychodynamic-psychotherapy/

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