Are Some Psychotherapies Much More Effective Than Others?
Lester Luborsky, Robert Rosenthal, Louis Diguer, Tomasz P. Andrusyna, Jill T. Levitt, David A. Seligman, Jeffrey S. Berman and Elizabeth D. Krause
From the issue entitled "Rosenzweig Jubilee Issue"
Abstract
In a previous paper we had reported on the examination of comparisons of 18 metaanalyses of active treatments with each other (Luborsky, Rosenthal, Diguer, et al., 2001). These metaanalyses gave a small and nonsignificant mean level of difference between types of treatments. The smallness of this correlation confirms Rosenzweig's (1936) expectation that because of the large overlap in effective ingredients of different psychotherapies, comparative studies of psychotherapies would show little difference. Such a comparison that includes psychoanalyses seems a long way off, but if outcomes of psychoanalyses are defined similarly to those in the other psychotherapies, the expected differences in outcomes may also be small.