Health care reform has made short-term psychotherapy an increasingly popular treatment option. This informative volume explores the potential of brief psychotherapy through four paradigmatic modes of the individual's relationship to others: subservience, indecisiveness, entitlement, and fundamental fault - the latter of which deals with long-term, family-related emotional problems.

The Dilemmas of Brief Psychotherapy uses cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, and systems approaches to show clinical psychology practitioners and students how to decipher and respond to the narratives of patients' lives. James Gustafson's highly readable treatise arms the modern practitioner with solutions to the myriad of problematic situations encountered throughout the course of a brief psychotherapy.

1. The author examines how patients keep themselves distressed in brief psychotherapy, and asserts that an adequate map for a given patient must determine what is overlooked in the outer world (selective inattention) and inner world (dissociation), whether the character of a patient in his or her usual plot is simple or complex, and whether that character is benign or malignant.