Anna Bravesmith: The Art of Forming a Focus in Brief Dynamic Psychotherapy- How do we do it together?

It will emphasize the mutuality of the task and benefits of working together with the patient in constructing a clearly stated central issue, or dilemma, upon which therapy will be based. This will usually be formed out of interpersonal information, spontaneously provided by the patient, in the first three sessions which reveals maladaptive aspects of their habitual pattern of relating. Here and now manifestations of transference are included.

Anna Bravesmith is a Member of the Society of Analytical Psychology SAP and has a private analytic practice in London. She has also worked for more than 15 years providing Brief Dynamic Psychotherapy in NHS Primary Care, working with patients from a wide variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.

Her experience spans pre-IAPT and post-IAPT periods in the NHS. She is an experienced and highly qualified supervisor and has taught at: LCP, AGIP, WPF, HBCF and SAP and on the Jungian Russian program, as well as the training in Slovenia. She has published papers on Supervision theory, Brief Therapy, and Jungian Analysis. She lectures widely in UK and abroad.

A full academic paper is attached to this notice.

Rob

ABSTRACT   The author explores the subjective and objective nature of time in relation to brief psychotherapy, the contemporary contexts for this work and the impact of research on the changing culture of provision of counselling/psychotherapy.

She describes clinical treatment using a brief Dynamic Relational approach with a traumatized patient in primary care who presents with panic and depression.

Through this case she illustrates the most significant points of technique in her interpretation of this approach: assessment through interactional aspects of the first and second meetings, further assessment through history-taking and the development of narrative, forming a collaborative focus based on a maladaptive relational pattern, selective inattention and benign neglect, interpretative ‘action’, termination and the collaborative therapeutic summary and use of other attachment figures available in the primary care team setting, particularly during the termination phase.  The patient’s unconscious and conscious internalization processes enable brief treatment to be durable, and it is argued that depth can be achieved.

The author contends that brief therapy requires specific techniques but also makes connections with long-term analytic work , for example, the parallel between Bion’s concept of the ‘selected fact’ and the ‘focus’ in brief therapy.