The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss Moshe Talmon's (1990) book on single session therapy (SST). The review of the book presents a delineation and examination of the most important points made in each of the book's seven chapters.
Chapter One: When The First Session Is The Only Session
The first chapter of the book is primarily devoted to the description of research (both Talmon's research and that of others) supporting the notion that therapeutic clients can benefit from visiting a psychotherapist only one time. As delineated by Talmon, this research shows that clients experiencing only one therapy session often (about 50 to 80 percent of the time) receive one or more benefits from the session.
These benefits commonly include: (1) feeling satisfied that they received good and useable advice about their problems; and (2) the effective implementation of the therapist's recommendations for behavioral change. The cited research also showed that single sessions were sufficiently beneficial that social, medical, and psychological agencies could, if they so chose, implement SST as a viable mode of intervention for many of their clients, thereby reducing utilization of psychological/medical services by perhaps as much as sixty percent.
What is especially important regarding the cited research is that the benefits received by single-session clients appear to occur regardless of the reasons for the therapeutic intervention lasting no longer than one session. In this regard, it can be noted that there are commonly three reasons for why therapy only lasts a single session. First, the client and the therapist have both agreed (mutual consent) that only one session is needed. Second, the client elects to terminate therapy after one session; and, third, the therapist elects to terminate therapy after only one session.
Talmon goes on to report that the finding that so many of the clients receiving single s...