An Update and Overview of the Empirical Evidence for Transference-Focused Psychotherapy and Other Psychotherapies for Borderline Personality Disorder

It is generally believed that psychoanalytically or dynamically oriented clinicians are not interested in research for a host of reasons ranging from the challenges of designing a randomized controlled trial that would demonstrate the efficacy of a psychoanalytic approach to epistemological and philosophical disagreements about the nature of science (see [1–3] debates for an illustration). Although many in the psychoanalytic community have in the past been cautious regarding the value of research, some of the earliest psychotherapy research was performed by psychoanalysts [4–12]. Additionally, psychoanalyst and psychodynamic clinicians are increasingly becoming interested in testing psychodynamic hypotheses and establishing a stronger evidence base for treatments based on psychodynamic ideas [2, 3, 13–20]. This increased interest in psychotherapy outcome research has been particularly fruitful with regard to the study of borderline personality disorder. Severe personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder are increasingly seen as the mainstay of psychoanalytic clinical work.