Issues in teaching and learning time-limited psychodynamic psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy training is briefly reviewed, with particular attention to short-term forms of treatment and to empirical investigations of therapy training. There have been relatively few investigations of actual psychotherapy training, and the prospect is for even fewer in the future. The traditional pedagogic strategy for conceptualizing and developing psychodynamic training programs has been to adapt psychoanalytic clinical theory for instructional purposes. It is proposed that concepts, principles, and instructional strategies from the area of the cognitive sciences concerned with the development of generic expertise offers a potentially more fruitful theoretical/empirical framework for understanding therapeutic expertise and can be applied to developing improved psychotherapy teaching methods. The mental processes of therapists are discussed from this perspective. A teaching format based on multimedia computer technology and designed to fill a gap between didactic course work and actual therapy supervision is briefly described. In addition, recommendations are offered for improving psychotherapy training using existing methods.