Evaluating an alliance-focused treatment for personality disorders.

This paper presents a study with the aim of evaluating the relative efficacy of an alliance-focused treatment, brief relational therapy, in comparison to a short-term dynamic therapy and a cognitive–behavioral therapy on a sam-ple of highly comorbid personality dis-ordered patients. Results indicated that the three treatments were equally effec-tive on standard statistical analyses of change, including those conducted on repeated measures and residual gain scores. Some significant differences were indicated regarding clinically sig-nificant change and reliable change, favoring the brief relational and cognitive–behavioral models. There was also a significant difference re-garding dropout rates, favoring brief relational therapy.