title: Dual focus in brief psychodynamic psychotherapy.
abstract: The therapist needs to choose well the focus of treatment in brief psychodynamic psychotherapy, lest the therapy become fragmented. The therapeutic focus is crucial to the treatment of very impaired patients, in whom many experiences of themselves or others are compartmentalized or split off. Without a focus as a therapeutic tool to reintergrate these experiences, the patient becomes confused by interpretations directed at multiple, segregated parts of him or herself. When the therapist has not established a treatment focus, the therapist also becomes confused by the patient's multiple experiences of self and others. A case example illustrates the therapy of a patient who required dual foci arranged sequentially, in which the therapist treated three aspects of the patient's self-image as a primary focus, and the patient's grief over two stillborn children as a second focus. The patient could not grieve until the primary focus helped repair the breech in the patient's self-image.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005313:Fetal Death; D006801:Humans; D010200:Panic; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011247:Pregnancy; D011614:Psychotherapy, Brief / Q000379:methods*; D012649:Self Concept