[Psychotherapy motivation and psychotherapy acceptance. Initial results of the Mannheim intervention study]

In our controlled longitudinal study of a representative high-risk sample of psychogenically impaired individuals, within a multidimensional model of mental health, the variables "life event", "social support" and "personality" are examined concerning their analysis of variance and their interdependence. We assume that a therapeutic influence on the variable "personality" causes a modified risk of becoming psychogenically impaired, and intend to prove this in terms of the altered maturity of defenses, the improved ego-functions, but also in terms of the improvement of the social network and the rarer constellation of critical life events. The modified effect on the variable "personality" is a differential offer of psychoanalytic therapy. By means of our instruments of investigation we tried to clarify if the acceptance of psychotherapy offered to resp. the motivational situation of our probands in regard to a psychotherapy covariates with certain sociodemographically or depth psychologically measurable personality patterns. There was a trend towards accepting the offer of therapy in case of high psychical and socio-communicative psychogenic impairment and in case of relatively high frankness on the FPI scale. The acceptance of an offer of therapy correlated highly significantly with the frankness scale of the Bond questionnaire extended for several defense items. The implications of this finding are discussed.