In the age of managed care that prioritizes short-term, efficient therapeutic treatments over traditional long-term therapies, brief psychotherapies have become increasingly prevalent (Whittinghill, Whittinghill, & Loesch, 2000). Apart from the financial factors, brief psychotherapies have also been deemed by clients to be a preferred treatment approach for resolving short-term crisis situations (Cooper & Archer, 1999). As Cummings (1995) suggested, brief psychotherapies can be analogized to seeing family practitioners only when clients are in need of counseling. Once improvement is made, clients can terminate counseling and return at a later date when a new problem arises.
Currently, there are many different types of brief psychotherapeutic approaches: "psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, strategic concepts and techniques,à multimodal therapy, solution-focused therapy and systemic therapy" (Cooper & Archer, 1999, p. 21). The existence of a diversity of approaches to brief therapy also indicates that there is no blanket theory to encapsulate this approach (O'Hanlon, 1990).
Nonetheless, for the remainder of this paper, the distinctive characteristics that link all these different brief psychotherapies together will be identified and discussed based on their applicability in a clinical context.
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of brief psychotherapies is the brief therapists' conscious management of time. More precisely, brief therapists utilize time as a strategic technique for contributing to the quality of the treatment. While some therapists may establish a limited number of sessions at the beginning of the therapy, which would be determined in accordance to the client's situation, others may vary the duration and the frequency of the sessions at different times of the process. The deliberate emphasis on time is designed to galvanize clients into action, thus heightening their level of attention and...