Psychodynamic Psychotherapies

Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP)

Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy is a form of dynamic psychotherapy based on psychoanalytic theory and attachment theory, focused on unconscious internal processes, past experiences, anxiety, resistances and repressed feelings. It is included in the broader category of dynamic experiential therapies that have as a basic axis the experience of every emotion, the closeness and rehabilitation of the ability to create healthy attachments and relationships with others.

The main difference of ISTDP from classic psychoanalysis is that the therapist has a more active and moving role, establishing the patient’s resistances and helping him/her confront them, get over them and afterwards experience and process her/his feelings. The brief character  of ISTDP aims at achieving  core changes in a short period of time, keeping in mind although that long-term forms might be necessary or desirable in some cases.

The main axis of ISTDP is the principle that attachment traumas in early developmental stages hinder the process of complex feelings, resulting in repulsion, deterring their experience. When these repulsed feelings emerge later in life, resistances and unconscious anxiety are moved anew, producing symptoms like depression, panic attacks, anger tantrums, problematic reactions in relationships with others and psychosomatic symptoms.

The goal of the therapeutic process in ISTDP is for the patient to realize her/his resistances and get over them, learning gradually to endure the anxiety that mobilizes the change and managing to experience every emotion, positive and negative, who were until that time repulsed. The experience works therapeutically and leads to the remission of symptoms, allowing the patient to locate the origin of these feelings and process them together with the therapist, leading to healing of the trauma, remission of psychopathology, ameliorated experience with feelings and better interpersonal relationships.

It is suggested for people with emotional disordes (depression, chronic dysthymia), anxiety disorders (general anxiety disorder, panic disorder), somatoform disorders, personality disorders.