Patient pretreatment interpersonal problems and therapeutic alliance in short-term cognitive therapy

The growing consensus regarding the importance of interpersonal process in psychotherapy, as well as of interpersonal factors in self-definition, has underscored the relevance of examining patient interpersonal functioning as it relates to the development of the therapeutic alliance. This study examined the relationship of patient pretreatment interpersonal functioning (as measured by the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems and the Million Clinical Multiaxial Inventory) to the therapeutic alliance (as measured early in treatment by a patient self-report version of the Working Alliance Inventory). On the basis of an interpersonal circumplex interpretation, the results generally indicated that friendly-submissive interpersonal problems were positively related to the development of aspects of the alliance and that hostile-dominant problems were negatively related to the development of aspects of the alliance early in short-term cognitive therapy.