Changes in defensive functioning in completed psychoanalyses : the penn psychoanalytic treatment collection

Objective. The aim of this naturalistic study is to examine whether a sample of subjects showed improvements in their defensive functioning after undergoing psychoanalysis.Methods. Seventeen subjects from the Penn Psychoanalytic Treatment Collection with completed, tape-recorded psychoanalyses had their defense mechanisms rated both for early and late sessions.Results. The pre-post effect size for the change in overall defensive functioning (ODF) of the sample was large (0.76) and statistically significant. The percentage of subjects who improved (71%) in their ODF was similar to that found by others who studied the same sample using general functioning measures.Conclusions. These findings provide the first empirical evidence to support a sustained trait-like change in dynamic personality functioning in patients who have undergone psychoanalysis. Future randomized and controlled studies with homogeneous samples are needed to further confirm these findings