What is it that makes some therapists so much more effective than others, even when they are delivering the same evidence-based treatment? This instructive book identifies specific interpersonal skills and attitudes--often overlooked in clinical training--that facilitate better client outcomes across a broad range of treatment methods and contexts. Reviewing 70 years of psychotherapy research, the preeminent authors show that empathy, acceptance, warmth, focus, and other characteristics of effective therapists are both measurable and teachable. Richly illustrated with annotated sample dialogues, the book gives practitioners and students a blueprint for learning, practicing, and self-monitoring these crucial clinical skills.

Mental health professionals and accrediting bodies have steadily been embracing competency-focused learning and clinical practice. In contrast to a skill, a competency is a level of sufficiency evaluated against an external standard. Learning to be clinically competent involves considerably more than the current emphasis on skill and micro skill training. While there are now a small number of books that describe the various clinical competencies of counseling and psychotherapy, none of these books focus on how to learn them. Highly Effective Therapy emphasizes the process of learning these essential competencies. It illustrates them in action with evidence-based treatment protocols and clinical simulations to foster learning and competency. Highly Effective Therapy is a hands-on book that promotes learning of the 20 competencies needed for effective and successful clinical practice.

Neuropsychotherapy is intended to inspire further development and continual empirical updating of consistency theory. It is essential for psychotherapists, psychotherapy researchers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and mental-health professionals. Profoundly important and innovative, this volume provides necessary know-how for professionals as it connects the findings of modern neuroscience to the insights of psychotherapy. Throughout the book, a new picture unfolds of the empirical grounds of effective psychotherapeutic work. Author Klaus Grawe articulates a comprehensive model of psychological functioning-consistency theory-and bridges the gap between the neurosciences and the understanding of psychological disorders and their treatment. Neuropsychotherapy illustrates that psychotherapy can be even more effective when it is grounded in a neuroscientific approach. Cutting across disciplines that are characteristically disparate, the book identifies the neural foundations of various disorders, suggests specific psychotherapeutic conclusions, and makes neuroscientific knowledge more accessible to psychotherapists. The book's discussion of consistency theory reveals the model is firmly connected to other psychological theoretical approaches, from control theory to cognitive-behavioral models to basic need theories.

An in-depth look at a much misunderstood practice, offering a fresh viewpoint on how this science can be a universally effective route to our better selves.

The field of counseling and psychotherapy has for years presented the puzzling spectacle of unabating enthusiasm for forms of treatment whose effectiveness cannot be objectively demonstrated. With few exceptions, statistical studies have consistently failed to show that any form of psychotherapy is followed by significantly more improvement than would be caused by the mere passage of an equivalent period of time. Despite this, practitioners of various psychotherapeutic schools have remained firmly convinced that their methods are effective. Many recipients of these forms of treatment also believe that they are being helped. The series of investigations reported in this impressive book resolve this paradoxical state of affairs. The investigators have overcome two major obstacles to progress in the past--lack of agreement on measures of improvement and difficulty of measuring active ingredients of the psychotherapy relationship. The inability of therapists of different theoretical persuasions to agree on criteria of improvement has made comparison of the results of different forms of treatment nearly impossible. The authors have solved this intractable problem by using a wide range of improvement measures and showing that, regardless of measures used in different studies, a significantly higher proportion of results favor their hypothesis than disregard it. Overall, this book represented a major advance at the time of its original publication and is of continuing importance. The research findings resolve some of the most stubborn research problems in psychotherapy, and the training program based on them points the way toward overcoming the shortage of psychotherapists.

One of the most creative, inspired, and inspiring books in the history of psychotherapy, presenting reflections on what makes for effective psychotherapy. This work contains the mature writings of Hellmuth Kaiser, originally trained by Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, and others. A book that has been out of print for over 35 years now, once again available, with new essays bringing new perspectives and an in-depth appreciation of an intensely original thinker. Foreword by Allen J. Enelow, M.D., and Leta McKinney Adler, Ph.D. (1965). Afterword by Louis B. Fierman, M.D. (1965). With 5 new essays for the second edition (2012), by Louis B. Fierman, M.D., Mitchell D. Ginsberg, Ph.D., Howard Kahn, Ph.D., Jerry Krakowski, and Alan P. Towbin, Ph.D.