Doing Psychotherapy Effectively

by Mona Sue Weissmark, Mona S. Weissmann, Daniel A. Giacomo

Psychotherapy is a $2.5 billion business in the United States, but no one can answer the basic question of how therapy works. No watchdog groups rank therapists for potential consumers; no one school of thought has proven to be superior to another. And no method has emerged for determining what makes therapy successful for some but not for others. Doing Psychotherapy Effectively proposes much-needed answers to the puzzling questions of what therapists actually do when they are effective.

Mona Sue Weissmark and Daniel A. Giacomo offer a unique mode of evaluation that focuses not on a particular school of therapy but on the relationship between therapist and patient. Their approach, the "Harvard Psychotherapy Coding Method," begins with the assumption that good therapeutic relationships are far from intuitive. Successful relationships follow a pattern of behaviors that can be identified and quantified, as the authors demonstrate through clinical research and videotaped sessions of expert therapists. Likewise, positive changes in the patient, observed through client feedback and case studies, can be described operationally; they involve the process of overcoming feelings of detachment, helplessness, and rigidity and becoming more involved, effective, and adaptable.

Weissmark and Giacomo explain and ground these principles in the practice of psychotherapy, making Doing Psychotherapy Effectively an accessible and pragmatic work which will give readers a tool for measuring therapeutic effectiveness and further understanding human transformation. For the first time, successful therapy is described in a way that can be practiced and communicated.

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

From:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_We...

Mona Sue Weissmark is an American clinical psychologist and social psychologist, researcher, and author whose work on diversity and justice has received global recognition. She is best known for her groundbreaking social experiment of bringing children of Holocaust survivors face-to-face with children of Nazis, and later, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African American slaves with descendants of slave owners.

She is also a professor of psychology and author of numerous journal articles and the books: Doing Psychotherapy Effectively (University of Chicago Press); Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II (Oxford University Press); The Science of Diversity® (Oxford University Press).

Weissmark received a bachelor’s degree at McGill University and a doctorate degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She went on to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and was appointed lecturer at Harvard Medical School, teaching graduate courses on research methods. Later, she moved to Chicago and joined the faculty at Roosevelt University as a tenured associate professor of Psychology and also joined the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University as a visiting scholar.

Weissmark was named Visiting Associate Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and founded the Global Mental Health Studies Program at the Buffett Institute. She also is a visiting professor of Psychology at Harvard University where she teaches the course “Psychology of Diversity” and conducts research on the science of diversity.

Weissmark was born in Vineland, New Jersey. She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband a University of Chicago psychiatrist. They have one awesome daughter.