Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy: Methods, Evidence, Indications and Limitations
While ISTDP is not a panacea, it is a treatment that is clinically useful in diverse psychological and psychiatric samples.
Based on more than one thousand case studies using videotaped research (Davanloo, 1977; Abbass et al., 2015a), an in-depth understanding of patterns and processes deriving from unresolved attachment trauma has been developed. Interrupted attachments produce a series of feelings including at least grief. In most individuals who have had attachment trauma, the interruption is so painful that it induces rage that is guilt-laden and that becomes buried and avoided. Later relationships activate the attachment feelings including love, grief and any rage and guilt about the rage. When these feelings are mobilized at an unconscious level, they induce unconscious anxiety in specific demonstrable pathways and a series of matching unconscious defense patterns (Davanloo 2000; Abbass, 2015).