Doc Samson said:
I'm in... though if we're having one post on the differences between psychiatry and psychology, maybe we could have on on my pet topic of the differences of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy 😛
I think that would be great. Here are some questions I have on the topic in addition to the general differences between psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy:
1) a) Is psychodynamic psychotherapy best thought of as a specific type of intervention such as exposure therapy, cognitive therapy, EMDR, ECT, clozaril, etc OR b) is it best characterized as a "way of thinking about the human psyche"
2) If a) from question 1, then for which patients is it most useful? what is the evidence for this usefulness? and in the absence of current evidence, why is its use justified, when other modalities are proven to be effective for those patients? If b) can some of you share vignettes about how this way of thinking has helped you treat a patient?
3) Is psychodynamic psychotherapy harder (and/or more time consuming) to learn than othey types of psychotherapy? If so, how is this extra effort justified given an explosion of empirically validated psychotherapies? I don't see many programs teaching EMDR or mindfulness. And even DBT, which has a pretty extensive evidence base, is only taught by a handful of programs.
4) How uniform is "psychodynamic psychotherapy"? That is, are we even all talking about the same thing or does every department have its own variant? If so what are the core, unchanging elements?
5) UCSF now has didactics entitled "evidence-based" psychodynamic psychotherapy. Peter Fogarty has developed his own "evidence-based" psychodynamic psychotherapy, so has Jacques Barber. What sets these apart?
6) Why is psychodynamic psychotherapy so prominent in psychiatric training (to the point that the ACGME lists "competency" in it as a requirement), whereas is it is absent from the vast majority of psychology training programs? This seems odd given that psychologists only therapeutic tool is psychotherapy.