Therapists' interventions in different psychotherapy approaches: category and temporal aspects

This study describes and compares the in-session interventional behaviour of therapists who were clearly affiliated with five different types of psychotherapy: psychoanalysis, Gestalt, transactional analysis, bioenergetic analysis and systemic therapy. To determine the relative occurrence of elements specific to therapists’ own, specific to other or common to all types of psychotherapy under investigation, audio-recorded psychotherapy sessions were analysed. A second aim was to investigate if the duration of interactional units were related to certain types of intervention, hypothesizing that longer durations of intervals between therapeutic interventions might indicate higher complexities of processing in patients. Time-lined verbatim transcripts of 11 therapists’ verbal interventions from 137 (complete) psychotherapy sessions with 41 patients were coded according to a specially developed multi-method rating manual with 100 different intervention categories. Therapists used a fairly wide spectrum of different interventions, i.e., they worked eclectically. On average they used rather few techniques from their own type of psychotherapy (9.9%), about twice as many from other types of psychotherapy (18.9%), and mostly non-specific, common techniques (67.3%). Certain types of interventions were indeed followed by time intervals whose duration significantly exceeded that of others. More than two-thirds of psychotherapists’ interventions – under naturalistic conditions – were common techniques. About 30% of the interventions, however, were techniques specific to different types of psychotherapy. Among these, we found some interventions to engage patients in activities of a longer duration, which may indicate higher complexities of processing