A Comparison of Core Conflictual Relationship Themes Before Psychotherapy and During Early Sessions

This report shows (a) that the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT) can be rated reliably either from therapy sessions or from a special pretreatment interview in a group of depressed pa-tients, and (b) that the CCRTs obtained before treatment are similar to the CCRTs extracted from the early sessions of brief dynamic psychotherapy. The data suggest that, at least in the early sessions of treatment, the therapist's influence did not significantly alter the patients ' CCRTs. In the last 15 years, several measures of central relationship patterns or dynamic formulations have been presented in the clinical research literature (for a review, see Barber & Crits-Christoph, 1993). The Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT; Luborsky & Crits-Christoph, 1990) method is one of the measures that has received much research attention. Its in-terjudge reliability has been shown to be adequate in a moder-ate-sized sample (Crits-Christoph et al., 1988). With regard to validity, various findings have supported the hypothesis that the CCRT method seems to assess a construct consistent with many characteristics of the transference pattern described by Freu