Dependency and ego-strength as indicators of patients' attendance in psychotherapy

Studied patients' decisions to continue treatment. Ss (N = 100) were adult, nonpsychotic outpatients, who received individual psychotherapy at least once a week. The collected data were analyzed to identify the number of patients and the mean number of sessions in each category of dependency and ego-strength. Findings indicated that there was no direct relationship between patients' dependency scores and the number of sessions in psychotherapy and between patients' ego-strength and attendance in psychotherapy. The data indicated, however, that a statistically inverse relationship existed between dependency and ego-strength scores. The conclusion was that neither dependency nor ego-strength are indicators for predicting patients' attendance in psychotherapy, at least when the population is composed of adult, nonpsychotic outpatients.