Reading and Viewing Library

A working library of texts and recordings drawn on across our programs. It is not exhaustive, and it reflects our own reading rather than a canon.

New to Psychodynamic Thinking?

If you are new to psychodynamic work, or trained primarily in another modality, these are the places we would suggest beginning.

Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist. A brief and readable overview of the psychodynamic approach, and of the research evidence for its effectiveness. The best single starting point. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018378
Yalom, I. The Gift of Therapy. Insights and practical guidance for beginning psychotherapists. Each chapter runs a few pages and can be read in five minutes.
McWilliams, N. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Chapter 2, on the psychoanalytic sensibility, is the essential reading. The whole book repays attention.
Wolff, H. H. (1971). The therapeutic and developmental functions of psychotherapy. An excellent account of the difference between “doing to” and “being with,” and why both are necessary. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1971.tb02155.x
Hazanov, V. The Fear of Doing Nothing. Accessible reading, with anecdotes from a young therapist’s practice. A shorter version is available as an article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2012.10746517
Barsness, R. Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis. Clear, approachable, and a good overall view of contemporary relational practice.

Evidence and Research

The Evidence Base for Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy is sometimes described as lacking an evidence base. This is no longer an accurate account of the literature, and it has not been for some time.

What follows is a short guide to the research most relevant to registrars and to clinicians working psychodynamically in settings where they may be asked to justify their approach. We have tried to represent the findings as they stand, including where the evidence is more qualified than advocates sometimes suggest. Overstating the case does the field no favours, and a psychologist who cites a study that does not say what they claimed will find the whole argument discounted.

The foundational paper remains Shedler’s 2010 review in American Psychologist, which set out the distinctive features of psychodynamic technique and summarised the outcome literature then available. Fonagy’s 2015 update in World Psychiatry extended this across diagnostic groups and remains the most useful single overview.
More recent work has narrowed in on particular questions.
Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression. Caselli and colleagues (2023) conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of STPP in depressive disorders, finding a large effect on symptom severity at the end of treatment compared with no intervention, and clear superiority over unstructured usual care.
Psychodynamic therapy compared with antidepressants. Wienicke and colleagues (2025) carried out an individual participant data meta-analysis — a more rigorous design than conventional meta-analysis, since it works from the original trial data rather than published summaries — comparing antidepressant medication with STPP for adult depression. This is the study to read if you are asked to justify psychotherapy over medication, or to think about which patients suit which.
Young adults. Trotta and colleagues (2024) reviewed 22 studies of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapy with people aged 18 to 27. Their finding is worth stating precisely: psychodynamic psychotherapy showed a significant effect compared with waiting list and treatment as usual, but no significant difference compared with other active treatments. This is the pattern found across much of the comparative psychotherapy literature, and it is an honest result rather than a disappointing one — it places psychodynamic therapy alongside other established approaches rather than above them.
Long-term work and patient experience. Barrett and colleagues (2025) synthesised ten qualitative studies of adults in long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for complex mood and personality difficulties. Rather than measuring outcome, it asks what patients say about the experience — organising 64 findings into five themes, including the initial difficulty of starting therapy, the non-linear character of change, and the ambivalence surrounding termination. For clinicians, it is a useful corrective to outcome research that treats change as a smooth curve.
There is a second body of evidence that psychodynamic clinicians often overlook, and it may be the more important one.
For more than two decades, an interdivisional American Psychological Association task force chaired by John Norcross has been examining not which treatment works, but which elements of the relationship work. The third iteration, published in 2018 and 2019, comprises dozens of original meta-analyses. Of the relationship elements examined, the expert consensus judged nine demonstrably effective, seven probably effective, and one promising but insufficiently researched.
The alliance itself has been examined most closely. Flückiger and colleagues (2018) synthesised 295 independent studies covering more than 30,000 patients, finding a consistent association between alliance and outcome (r = .278, d = .579) — an effect that holds irrespective of the therapist’s theoretical orientation.
Norcross and Lambert make a further point that deserves attention: they trace what they describe as the devaluation of the therapy relationship in contemporary treatment guidelines and evidence-based practice frameworks. The apparatus we have built for identifying effective treatments has tended to look past the variable that most consistently predicts whether treatment works.
For psychodynamic clinicians this evidence is worth sitting with, because it neither flatters nor dismisses us.
What it establishes is that the relationship is not the soft background against which technique operates. It is an active ingredient, and one with a stronger and more consistent evidence base than most brand-name treatment differences. Psychodynamic training has always taken this seriously — transference, countertransference, rupture and repair, and the therapist’s own reflective capacity are not adjuncts to the work but the substance of it. On this evidence, that emphasis looks less like a historical idiosyncrasy and more like attention to what actually matters.
What it does not establish is that psychodynamic therapy owns the relationship, or that relational attentiveness is unique to us. The task force findings apply across orientations, and good therapists of every persuasion attend to alliance, empathy, and rupture. The honest claim is not that we alone value the relationship, but that we have the most developed conceptual vocabulary for thinking about what happens within it — and that our training makes sustained use of it.
A further caution, since our audience is a thoughtful one: correlation between alliance and outcome does not settle the direction of causation. Patients who are improving may form better alliances, rather than the alliance producing the improvement. The literature has taken this seriously and the association survives reasonable scrutiny, but anyone citing it should know the objection exists.
We include Harari and Grant’s paper on clinical wisdom and evidence, and McWilliams’ interview on the difficulty of building an evidence base for psychotherapy, because the question of what counts as evidence is itself a live one in our field.
Randomised trials answer a particular kind of question well. They are less suited to questions about meaning, about what a symptom is for, or about what happens between two people over several years. Holding both — taking the outcome literature seriously while remaining alert to what it cannot capture — seems to us the honest position, and it is one we return to throughout our programs.
Barrett, A., Campbell, C., Luyten, P., Fonagy, P., & Moser, M. (2025). Patient experiences of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for mood and personality disorders: A systematic review and meta-aggregation of qualitative studies. Journal of Counseling Psychology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000844
Caselli, I., Ielmini, M., Bellini, A., Zizolfi, D., & Callegari, C. (2023). Efficacy of short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy (STPP) in depressive disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 325, 169–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.01.014
Fonagy, P. (2015). The effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapies: An update. World Psychiatry, 14(2), 137–150. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20235
Harari, E., & Grant, S. (2022). Clinical wisdom, science and evidence: The neglected gifts of psychodynamic thinking. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1177/00048674221077622
Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., Solms, M., & Arnold, S. E. (2020). Outcome research and the future of psychoanalysis: Clinicians and researchers in dialogue. Taylor & Francis. (Chapter 1 in particular; then chapters 2, 3 and 7.)
Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (2018). Psychotherapy relationships that work III. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 303–315. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000193
Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (Eds.). (2019). Psychotherapy relationships that work: Volume 1. Evidence-based therapist contributions (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Norcross, J. C., & Wampold, B. E. (Eds.). (2019). Psychotherapy relationships that work: Volume 2. Evidence-based therapist responsiveness (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98–109. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018378
Trotta, A., Gerber, A. J., Rost, F., Robertson, S., Shmueli, A., & Perelberg, R. J. (2024). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy for young adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1366032. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1366032
Wienicke, F., Dekker, J. J. M., Peen, J., Van, H. L., Barber, J. P., McCarthy, K. S., Solomonov, N., Karlsson, H., Hietala, J., López-Rodríguez, J., Villamil-Salcedo, V., Burk, W. J., Spijker, J., Twisk, J. W. R., Cohen, Z. D., Cuijpers, P., & Driessen, E. (2025). Antidepressant medication or short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy for depression? A systematic review and meta-analysis of individual participant data. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/cps0000281
Nancy McWilliams interviewed by New Therapist — on the difference between research and therapy, and the difficulties inherent in building an evidence base for psychotherapy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptvbUjjdJ8E

Common Questions

Yes. Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy has been evaluated in numerous randomised controlled trials and meta-analyses, and manualised protocols exist for depression, anxiety and somatic presentations. Caselli and colleagues (2023) found a large effect on depressive symptoms compared with no intervention. Where the comparison is with other active psychotherapies, differences are typically small or absent — which is the usual finding in comparative psychotherapy research generally, and applies equally to CBT.
Wienicke and colleagues (2025) addressed this directly using individual participant data from randomised comparisons. Their analysis is the most methodologically rigorous available on this question, and the appropriate one to cite when discussing treatment selection with a patient or a referrer. We would encourage you to read it rather than rely on a summary, including ours.
Trotta and colleagues (2024) reviewed 22 studies of 18- to 27-year-olds. Psychodynamic psychotherapy showed a significant benefit over waiting list and treatment as usual, and no significant difference from other active treatments. This supports psychodynamic work as a legitimate option for this group, not as a superior one.
The short-term literature has clear limits when the difficulty is characterological rather than symptomatic. Barrett and colleagues (2025) offer a qualitative account of what patients describe in long-term work — including how demanding starting is, how uneven change feels, and how much of the value patients locate in gaining new perspectives rather than in symptom reduction alone.
Because the relationship is not something one has instead of technique — it is something one works within, and thinking well about it requires a framework. The Norcross task force findings establish that relationship elements are potent across orientations; they do not establish that any clinician attends to them equally well without training. Psychodynamic work offers a developed vocabulary for what happens between two people over time, and sustained supervision in using it.
Shedler (2010) if you have twenty minutes. Fonagy (2015) if you want the fuller picture across diagnoses.

Theory and Formulation

McWilliams, N. Psychoanalytic Diagnosis.
Chapter 2 — a good summary of the major theoretical models: object relations, self psychology, ego psychology
Chapter 3 — the distinction between neurotic, borderline, and psychotic personality organisation
Chapters 5 and 6 — helpful descriptions of defensive processes - Chapters 7–15 — one chapter per personality structure
Johnson, S. Character Styles.
Based on Reich’s character structures, with a developmental and attachment perspective folded in.
Finlay, L. Relational Integrative Psychotherapy.
Chapter 1 – for an overview
Chapters 2–10 – on being and doing processes.
Summers, R., & Barber, J. Psychodynamic Therapy: A Guide to Evidence-Based Practice.
Chapter 7 on formulation, building on the core psychodynamic problems set out in chapters 5 and 6.
Book, H. How to Practice Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: The CCRT Method.
Chapter 2 on forming the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme.
Strupp, H., & Binder, J. Psychotherapy in a New Key: A Guide to Time Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy.
Chapter 5 describes construction of the Cyclical Maladaptive Pattern.
Levenson, H. Time-Limited Dynamic Psychotherapy.
Chapter 4 on case formulation, with further material on constructing the CMP.
Busch, F., et al. Manual of Panic-Focused Psychodynamic Psychotherapy.
A clear psychodynamic approach to panic disorder, and to panic in the context of generalised anxiety or agoraphobia.
Smolak, L., & Levine, M. P. (2015). The Wiley Handbook of Eating Disorders.
Chapter 20 sets out a psychodynamic theory of eating disorders.
Petrucelli, J. (Ed.). (2014). Body-States: Interpersonal and Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders. Routledge.

Watching the Work

Watching psychotherapy is different from reading about it. Everything below is freely available.

Nancy McWilliams interviewed by New Therapist
On the difference between research and therapy, and the difficulties inherent in building an evidence base for psychotherapy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptvbUjjdJ8E
Couples Therapy — documentary series with Dr Orna Guralnik, filmed with real clients with their consent. A rare opportunity to watch sustained relational work unfold across sessions. SBS On Demand — free, registration required, available in Australia https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/program/couples-therapy

Invitation

If you are looking for more than a pathway to endorsement — if you are looking for a community committed to thoughtful supervision, scholarship, and lifelong professional development — we would be delighted to welcome you to Insight.

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