The meaning of empirically supported treatment research for psychoanalyticand other long-term therapies

Two ways of evaluating the implications of empirically supported treatment research for psychoanalysis and other long-term therapies are considered. T he first involves the comparison of the relative benefits of various psycho therapies; the second involves the comparison of short-term and long-term p sychotherapies. The major findings are that (a) each of the different types of psychological treatments shows benefits, (b) the amount of benefits fro m each type of therapy shows mainly nonsignificant differences, (c) these n onsignificant differences are especially evident when the researcher's ther apeutic allegiance is taken into account, (d) both short-term and long-term treatments show some positive benefits for some patients, and (e) there is a tendency for longer treatments to show more lasting benefits. The main g ap in research studies consists of a lack of comparative studies of psychoa nalysis versus other treatments. This review highlights the virtue of "meth odological pluralism," which means here applying to the same data a variety of methods for comparing psychotherapies with one another and for comparin g long-term and short-term psychotherapies.