The interaction between the therapeutic Alliance and Therapists' Interventions: An intra- session study

ROUSSOS, ANDRES; WAIZMANN, VANINA; ETCHENBARNE, IGNACIO

Santiago

Congreso; 40st Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research.; 2009

Society for Psychotherapy Research

The interventions realized by a psychotherapist throughout a psychotherapeutic treatment have as their direct or indirect goal to promote some type of change. However, the interventions' role cannot be evaluated only as a change promoter agent, but also as an obliged participant of that change. Therefore, as the change in the patient takes places, the way of intervening also changes, as part of the dialogic process involved in the treatment. The therapeutic alliance is considered at the moment a key common factor that has influence in the psychotherapeutic treatment results. Numerous studies have related the therapeutic alliance with therapeutic success, along with other therapeutic-setting elements, associated with the therapist or the patient. In the present study, the therapeutic alliance, evaluated with the Argentinean adaptation of the WAI (Horvath, 1981) in its observer version, has been linked to types of interventions in a micro-analytic study. The aim was to observe changes in the type of interventions formulated by the psychotherapists and its correlation with the level of the Therapeutic Alliance intra session in independent clinical materials. Interventions were analyzed independently by trained judges using the MCPI, a schema of psychotherapeutic interventions developed by Roussos et al. (2003, 2006). The relation between type of intervention and therapeutic alliance level was studied in 40 clinical sessions belonging to psychoanalytic and cognitive psychotherapeutic treatments.The change of the interventions was evaluated in terms of their theoretical specificity and non specificity, a content analysis and the therapeutic alliance, differentiated in intra session thematic units.