Serendipity?
Notwithstanding that some qualities are unique to a pyschoanalytically oriented approach, much of its healing potential is shared by therapists of all sorts. Although my attitude about this derives from personal experience, it is compatible with some very stringently conducted research. Analyzing the work of of Luborsky et al.(2000), Messer and Wampold (2002) observe that the current emphasis on "empirically supported treatments" is based on a discredited medical model an has contributed to an empirically unwarranted devaluation of the experiential, psychodynamic, and family therapies. They further conclude that specific, symptom-targeted strategies are effective "only insofar as they are a component of a larger healing context," and that (as we have known for a long time) more variance in outcome arises from differences among therapists than from differences among treatment approaches.
...It makes little sense to teach students how to deal effective with the easiest clients, leaving them to learn by the school of hard knocks how to work with more challenging ones—all the while suffering from vaguely defined guilt that they are breaking textbook rules.
...there are some things students need to know that are even more basic and fundamental to psychoanalytic practice than how to interpret transferences and resistances or how to understand the working-through process or when to consider ending treatment. They need to know how to maintain their own self-esteem, how to behave in a way that is both professional and natural, and how to protect their own boundaries from the incursions that their more desperate clients insist on attempting. ...I also know that beginners need specifics and are not helped by vague statements to the effect of "It all depends."
...applicants to most social work programs know better than to tell their prospective teachers that they want to be therapists instead of administrators or social activists. Large segments of the public believe that therapy is about blaming one's parents, avoiding personal responsibility, and rationalizing selfishness. Therapists are neither well organized nor temperamentally disposed to battling their disparagers. So I am trying to give moral and conceptual support to trainees who, despite all these circumstances, know that psychotherapy is the project to which they want to commit the rest of their working lives.
...Perhaps it is more accurate to to say that my vision of science encompasses clinical lore as a legitimate source of knowledge in addition to what can be learned from controlled studies. I deeply believe we need to be just as respectful toward more poetic, metaphorically expressed, experience-based clinical theory as we are toward more highly controlled research.
...Because of the American affinity for the new and revolutionary, psychoanalysis in its youth was too often uncritically embraced here; now in its maturity it is too often uncritically dismissed.
...Despite my strong feeling that we need to do lots more research on psychotherapy and to pay attention to what researches have already established, I have learned much more from passionate practitioners than from dispassionate researchers.
(my emphasis)
Oh...I like her.