[1][2][3][4] Their main purpose is revealing the unconscious content of a client's psyche in an effort to alleviate psychic tension, which is inner conflict within the mind that was created in a situation of extreme stress or emotional hardship, often in the state of distress.
The techniques draw on the theories of Freud, Klein, and the object relations movement, e.g., Winnicott, Guntrip, and Bion.
[8][9] The principles of psychodynamics were introduced in the 1874 publication Lectures on Physiology by German physician and physiologist Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke.
During the same year, von Brücke was supervisor to first-year medical student Sigmund Freud at the University of Vienna.
Later, both the concept and application of psychodynamics were further developed by the likes of Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, and Melanie Klein.
[23][24] As in some psychoanalytic approaches, the therapeutic relationship is seen as a key means to understanding and working through the relational difficulties which the client has suffered in life.
[26] Later meta-analyses showed psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy to be effective, with outcomes comparable or greater than other kinds of psychotherapy or antidepressant drugs,[26][27][28] but these arguments have also been subjected to various criticisms.
[38] A 2012 meta-analysis by the Harvard Review of Psychiatry of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) found effect sizes ranging from 0.84 for interpersonal problems to 1.51 for depression.
[39] In 2011, a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry made 103 comparisons between psychodynamic treatment and a non-dynamic competitor and found that 6 were superior, 5 were inferior, 28 had no difference and 63 were adequate.
[24] Because the effectiveness of treatment relies so heavily on the patient giving information to their therapist, the patient-therapist relationship is more vital to psychodynamic therapy than almost every other type of medical practice.