Introduction to the Special Issue. An analysis of a short term dynamic psychotherapy

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the various forms of brief psychotherapy derived from psychoanalytic principles (e.g., Alexander & French, 1946; Mann, 1973; Strupp & Binder, 1984), which has transformed this form of intervention into the most widely used in the field. There is now a huge amount of psychotherapeutic approaches—Kazdin alone in 1986 had already identified over 400 different psychotherapies—a number today that has certainly grown—each of which relies on its own techniques and visions of mental functioning and psychopathology. Decades of process and outcome research, however, have lead us to able to say with confidence that there is no best model of intervention but rather that all these approaches, despite their diversity, share a common therapeutic mechanism in the clinical enterprise (Norcross, 2011) and in the good functioning of the patient-therapist relationship (Lingiardi, 2002; Wampold, 2001).