Evaluation of Daseinsanalytic (existential analytical) therapies

Report from a seminar of the Daseinsanalytic Seminar DaS

Abstract

For the second round of accreditation, the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) also calls for evaluation of the therapies carried out by candidates in the various psychotherapeutic training institutions, in order to test in this way the effectiveness of the psychotherapeutic methods taught there. We find nothing wrong with this approach. However, the requirement proves to be problematic when tools are prescribed for this purpose that fulfill scientific criteria that can only claim validity in the field of scientific research. In the seminar to be presented, we wanted to find out whether there are proven tools that we could at least partially adopt for the purpose of evaluating Daseinsanalytic therapies. We first studied the duo of BSCL and HoNOS as purely symptom-oriented questionnaires, as these have already been used as a standard in psychotherapeutic clinics in Switzerland since 2011 to evaluate the effectiveness of the psychotherapies conducted there. Reading them was informative and at the same time perplexing for us. However, we were positively impressed by the HUS, since it depicts the different stages of a psychoanalytic-hermeneutic psychotherapy process and in this respect is also congruent with Daseinsanalytic psychotherapy. However, if we were to adopt this scale as is, everything specifically Daseinsanalytic would be excluded. We therefore finally examined the question of how the stages of the HUS and the necessary foci could/should be reformulated so that they also express the existential-philosophical dimension which complements and deepens the psychoanalytic approach in «Daseinsanalysis» as taught and practiced at the DaS.