The Talking Cure

Freud would be thrilled. Talk therapy seems to be effective, at least when it comes to panic attacks:

Last week, a team of New York analysts published the first scientifically rigorous study of a short-term variation of the therapy for panic disorder, a very common form of anxiety. The study was small, but the therapy proved to be surprisingly effective in a group of severely disabled people.

The paper, which appeared in psychiatry's flagship journal, The American Journal of Psychiatry, is one of the most significant steps in a small but growing effort to study how this so-called psychodynamic therapy works, and for whom.

The brand of therapy tested relies on core tenets of analysis, like the search for the underlying psychological meaning of symptoms. But unlike traditional psychoanalysis, it focused on relieving symptoms quickly, and was time-limited. Previous studies of similar approaches have shown some promise for other disorders, like depression.

The results were rather impressive, even if the n was small. After just 12 weeks of therapy, 39 percent of patients being treated with relaxation techniques - this involves learning how to control and relax bodily muscles - improved significantly on standard measures of anxiety. But patients who had been treated with Freudian conversation - they dug deep into the "root causes" of the panic - did significantly better: almost 75 percent of these patients reported less anxiety and fewer panic attacks.

It will be interesting to see how these patients do over the long-term. Obviously, talk therapy has fewer side-effects than most anti-anxiety drugs. (As far as I can tell, the main drawback of talk therapy is that it's time intensive and rather expensive.) But I do hope that this study encourages other psychoanalysts to engage with empiricism. If talk therapy wants to be taken seriously, then it needs to accumulate a body of evidence supporting its efficacy.