Order a Complete Set of Videos from the Ulm Conference: Psychoanalytic Process Research Strategies III—June 4-6, 2009.  To order, please go to www.IPBooks.net and reserve your copy.

THE BERLIN RESEARCH RESOURCE FOR THERAPEUTIC IMPASSES
The field of psychotherapy has come to a kind of maturation. Large scale, repeated meta-analytic findings on the shorter treatments of all kind basically agree that the portion of outcome variance explained by the kind of therapy on the average is around 10%; the outcome variation explained by the therapist´s capacity to establish a working treatment is around 20%; the outcome variation explained by the patient´s capacity to utilize treatment is around 30%. The rest is unexplained variance due to many factors etc. The most logical action – accepting these findings – is the support of patients´for mastering difficult situations in treatment – but excactly this has not yet been been conceptualized. We all agree that difficulties with patients will bring therapists to peer supervison (in Germany called intervision); why not have supervion for patients in difficult situations.

Long before treatments fail due to border crossing or obvious lack of care that make even the most patient patients leave, patients should be offered a facility to seek professional advice.

This research project will provide patients with a resource for scrupulous, impartial consultative review of a treatment and for recommendations for future care.

Protocols will be developed and researchers employed to discern and categorize the problems brought to the facility. Scientific papers that will inform and improve clinical practice are the goal of this work.

Recommendations will be made but no treatment will be available through the advisors of the project itself. The concept of the project uses a third person to disentangle problematic situations that hinder patients to better sttand through conflictual situation that other wose might lead to the experience of treatment failure.

It is therefore not a traditional “second opinion” offered to evaluate the suitability of a treatment before work is begun, nor will there be any possibility of using the project as an alternative treatment source. It will remain carefully and rigorously neutral in its study and recomendations.

Principal investigator: Horst Kaechele, MD, PhD
Associated researchers will be: Almuth Sellschopp, PhD; Jochen Eckert, PhD and others
Advisor: David Orlinsky, PhD

Click on the screen below to view Horst Kaechele’s introduction to the conference.