Pretherapy Interpersonal Relations, Patients' Alliance, and Outcome in Brief Therapy

This study examined the relationship between pretherapy clinical assessments of interpersonal relations and (1) patients' therapeutic alliance and (2) outcome in time-limited psychotherapy (up to 25 sessions). For 33 college men with symptoms of depression, anxiety, and social introversion, clinical judgments of interpersonal relations predicted patients' level of collaborative, positively toned participation in a therapeutic relationship, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance in observers' ratings of audiotaped segments from therapy sessions. Pretherapy assessments of overall psychological health were highly comparable with assessments of interpersonal relations as predictors of a patient's alliance; however, when the redundancy between the two types of clinical judgments was controlled, interpersonal relations were the better predictor. Assessments of interpersonal relations were found to correlate with outcome measures at a modest level.