Identifying the unique constellation of defenses that each individual utilizes.

Specific Therapeutic Interventions of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP)

Davanloo, for example, discovered the layers of the dynamic unconscious through a process of developing specific interventions which allow the therapist to reach those layers. Those interventions, applied in a specific fashion at specific times in the therapeutic process, are all calculated to overcome the patient's resistance as quickly and completely as possible, to allow the earliest and fullest experience of true feelings about the present and past as quickly as possible. Those interventions are known as pressure, challenge, and head-on collision.

I. "Pressure": Therapeutic encouragement and reaching through to the patient

Pressure is the principal ingredient of ISTDP, and it takes many forms. Initially, pressure takes the form of encouraging the patient to describe symptoms and interpersonal difficulties as specifically as possible, so both patient and therapist get the clearest picture possible of the precise difficulties. It starts from the moment the patient walks into the room, in the form of the question, "Are there some difficulties you are experiencing which you would like us to have a look at?"

The primary form of pressure is pressure toward feeling. Again, this is exerted mainly in the form of questions, such as, "How did you feel toward your boss for humiliating you in front of your staff? We see that you got anxious and depressed, but how did you feel?"

Pressure can be toward the patient's will: "Can we look to your feelings? Do you want us to look to your feelings?"

Pressure is also exerted toward the therapeutic task: "Our goal here, if you want, is to get to the root, the engine, driving your difficulties. So, can we look at a specific time when you experienced anxiety? This will give us a clear picture of the problem which we can use to get to the engine."

In its essence, pressure is encouragement from the therapist to the patient. It is encouragement to renounce defences, tolerate anxiety, and walk, with the therapist, into those places which have previously been off-limits. It is a way of saying, "There's nothing in there we cannot face together, and we do so in your service, to relieve you of painful difficulties."

Patients with low resistance are often quite responsive to pressure alone. However, as explained above, those are the patients who are healthiest to begin with. For patients with higher levels of resistance, usually the product of a more traumatised early phase of life, pressure quickly leads to the patient erecting barriers with the therapist. Those barriers are the patient's habitual defences against avoided feelings. The combination of intentional (conscious) and unintentional (unconscious) defences is called the resistance. The therapist is constantly monitoring for both the rise in anxiety and the appearance of resistance. When resistance does make its appearance, new interventions, in addition to pressure, are called for.

II. "Challenge" pointing out and interrupting defenses in concert with the patient

Challenge is a two-stage process. The first stage is clarification, which is the therapist's effort to confirm that resistance is operating, and also to acquaint the patient with the specific defence being deployed. Patients are often quite unaware of their own defences. Clarification takes the form of a question, meant to clarify the defence to both patient and therapist: "Do you notice that when you speak of being angry with your boss that you smile and giggle? Is a smile something you sometimes do to cover up a deeper feeling?"

When a defence is properly clarified, both patient and therapist can work together against it, because it represents an obstacle to the therapeutic task of getting to the patient's true feelings. A defence which has not been clarified is still invisible to the patient.

Challenge to the defences represents an exhortation to the patient to abandon the defence: "Again you smile when I ask you about feelings in relation to being humiliated by your husband. If you don't smile, how were you truly feeling?" This particular intervention is a very powerful one in the therapist's arsenal. As with all powerful interventions, if it is misapplied, the consequences can be severe: rapid misalliance with the therapist, worsening of symptoms, and treatment dropout. This is because the patient perceives a premature challenge, applied when a defence has not been clarified, as a criticism or a personal attack.

A common misunderstanding of ISTDP is that the therapist's role is to badger the patient through the use of Challenge. However, the proper use of challenge is as an aid or enhancement to the therapeutic alliance by removing an obstacle to the rise in complex feelings with the therapist. If challenge originates as a product of frustration in the therapist or as a misunderstanding of the unconscious, then stalemate is virtually assured.

The main purpose of challenge is to remove any obstacles in the way of the mutually agreed upon task of getting to the engine of the patient's present difficulties: warded-off, complex feelings in relation to traumatising experiences with important attachment figures in the past.

The majority of patients are able to experience their true mixed feelings with a combination of Pressure and properly clarified Challenge. However, a sizeable minority of patients erect a massive wall of resistance with the therapist. This wall is erected automatically and is an over-learned, habitual response, used to avoid emotional intimacy, both with the therapist and with other important figures in the patient's personal orbit. When the therapist observes that the patient's resistance has fully crystallised, it is time to deploy the ultimate intervention.

III. "Head-on Collision": Pointing out the reality of the defenses and encouragement to overcome them"

The Head-on Collision is an intervention aimed not at any single defence but rather aimed at the entire defensive structure being deployed by the patient. It is an urgent appeal to the patient to exert maximal effort to overcome the resistance, and it takes the form of a summary statement to the patient which explains the consequences of continuing to resist:

Let's take a look at what's happening here. You have come on your own free will, because you are experiencing a problem which causes you pain. We have set out to get to the root of your difficulties, but every time we attempt to move toward it, you put up this massive wall. The wall keeps me out, and it keeps you from knowing your own true feelings. If you keep me out, you keep me useless. Is that what you want? Because, as you see, you are certainly capable of keeping me useless to you. My first question is, why would you want me to be useless? You see, the consequences of this would be that I would be unable to help you. I'd like to, but the nature of this work is that I can't help everyone. Sometimes I fail. However, can you afford to fail? How much longer do you want to carry this burden?

This complex intervention is simultaneously aimed at the patient's will, is a reminder of the task, and is a wake-up call to the therapeutic alliance to exert maximal effort against the resistance. It is a reminder, in stark terms, that the therapeutic task is in jeopardy and may well fail. Finally, it is a reminder to the patient of the consequences of failure, as well as an implied reminder that success is also possible.

The interventions of Pressure, Challenge, and Head-on Collision, all aimed at helping the patient experience true feelings in relation to the present and past, allowed Davanloo to expand the scope of patients who can be helped by short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy. A model which initially worked only with highly motivated patients able to describe a clearly problematic area can now be applied to patients whose difficulties are diffuse and whose motivation is also initially quite diffuse. The results are deep, lasting changes in areas of both symptomatic and interpersonal disturbances.

It is also worth stressing that ISTDP, unlike traditional psychodynamic therapies, assiduously avoids interpretation until such time as the unconscious is open. The use of trial interpretations is explicitly avoided. The phase of interpretation only commences once it is clear to both therapist and patient that there has been a passage of previously unconscious emotion. Quite often, it is then the patient who takes the lead in interpreting: "The incredible rage I felt toward you when you refused to let me off the hook regarding my feelings is exactly the same rage that I felt toward my father when I was five years old and found out he had been killed in the war and wasn't coming home. I buried the rage that day because I felt so guilty about it. That's the day I became depressed."