Dealing with emotions in psychotherapy

Similarities and differences in psychotherapeutic interventions

Abstract

Nine psychotherapists from five different approaches were interviewed by questionnaire between April and July 2022 about two video sequences of a recorded psychotherapy session. This was followed by the recorded colloquia. Using the example of the client in the video, the selected interventions were explained, justified and described in concrete terms. The primary data analysis was carried out using the PAP-S rating manual (Tschuschke et al. 2014), which assigns the intervention suggestions mentioned to general and school-specific psychotherapeutic interventions. At the second survey time point, the participants’ comments on the first results were generated in order to make their previous answers more precise. The findings show that there are similarities and differences between the groups, both across and within groups. They made use of both school-specific and general psychotherapeutic interventions, which confirms the assumption that not only school theory knowledge but also general psychotherapeutic interventions such as the therapeutic relationship are used in psychotherapy. Sometimes similar interventions were used at other times or by means of other school psychotherapy concepts and explanatory models, which suggests that, on the one hand, the variety of interventions is used and, on the other hand, that they partly correspond to each other.