This “Dodo bird verdict” (DBV) — everybody has won — has been applied to a long-time and never-ending debate about which psychotherapy approach is more effective in treating patients in need of psychotherapy (1), psychodynamic psychotherapy (PDPT), cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CBT), or one of the many other therapy modalities that exist in between and beyond and claim to be the best for all and everybody. Psychotherapists of all colors and proveniences have a clear answer to this question: Mine is the best because I believe it in and I am good at it…... The empirical side of this competition tells a different story. Whenever different psychotherapies were tested in clinical trials against another therapy of the same or different kind or against another control condition (see below), the effects of one therapy was not that much different from another therapy. Meta-analyses of today (2) confirm what Rosenzweig described in the classical DBV paper 80 years ago (1): All psychotherapies operate with similar assumptions, implement similar means, and generate similar results, based on what has been called “common factors” that are immanent to all psychotherapy traditions.
Dodo Bird Meets Goldilocks: Psychotherapy And The Placebo Effect
