Shared Therapeutic Features of Psychotherapies

Abstract

This presentation focusses on features shared by all forms of psychotherapy that contribute significantly to their effectiveness with all patients. In calling attention to these shared therapeutic features, I must emphasize that their existence is entirely compatible with the possibility that each of the approaches of my distinguished colleagues in this symposium may well have specific therapeutic effects and may be especially helpful for certain categories of patients, such as those with depression, phobias or borderline syndromes. Actually, a major research challenge is to disentangle the therapeutic effects that depend on features distinguishing one form of psychotherapy from another, from those produced by the features they all share.