History Unpredictable

I've just been re-reading one of my favorite books from training: Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, edited by Habib Davanloo (1980). In the first paragraph of the introduction, Davanloo describes the changes driving psychotherapists to seek a faster, more efficient method of therapy. Prime among these, he notes, is "the imminence of some form of universal health insurance limiting coverage to 20-30 sessions."

It's hard to know what country Davanloo is referring to. He was in Montreal; other contributers to the volume were in London, Boston, Nashville, and LA. Canada and Britain have national health plans now, but I'm pretty sure they already had them in 1980. Here in the states, universal health insurance seems anything but imminent-- in fact, seems much further away today than it did in 1992.

Any what of the gathering threat of "coverage limited to 20-30 sessions"? Managed care, in its capitalistic wisdom, has seen to it that coverage is limited to something more like four to eight sessions. Davanloo, come back and write us a volume on "Extremely Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy"!