DISABUSE OF THE DRUG METAPHOR - PSYCHOTHERAPY PROCESS OUTCOME CORRELATIONS

The drug metaphor suggests that if a process component (e.g., interpre tation) is an active ingredient of a successful psychotherapy, then ad ministering a relatively high level of it should yield a relatively po sitive outcome, and levels of the process component and the outcome sh ould be correlated across clients. Measures of 5 theoretically relevan t, reliably measured verbal process components were compared with the rate of change in 3 standard symptom intensity measures across the bri ef treatments of 39 (mainly depressed) psychotherapy clients. The expe cted significant process-outcome correlations were not found. These re sults are discussed as they illuminate some misleading assumptions tha t underlie many conventional studies of psychotherapy process and outc ome.