Moshe Talmon Archivi | Single Session Therapy

guest speaker at the symposium: Moshe Talmon

In today’s article we present to you the last of the three pioneers of Single Session Therapy who will participate in the IV Symposium on SST which this year will be held on 10, 11 and 12 November in Italy , in Rome , Moshe Talmon .

Moshe Talmon, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania ’82) initiated a series of studies at Kaiser Permanente Medical Group on patients who failed to show up for their second appointment after their first therapy session. Later, together with Michael Hoyt and Robert Rosenbaum , he began a study of 60 attempts at scheduled single-session therapy with patients who had required lengthy therapy.

Single Session Therapy and Psychotherapy: with which approaches a SST can be conducted?

Some therapists feel that their approach and training are not adequate for conducting a Single Session Therapy. This is not true, actualy.

We explained that TSS can be adapted with evident results in different contexts of application, treating people who have problems of different order and degree.

The question we asked ourselves is: is there a single way to do TSS? Is there a single session psychotherapy model in its own right? Or an exclusive therapeutic model that fits it?

Single session therapy is an old thing

La terapia a seduta singola è cosa vecchia

The fact that only one session can be enough to solve even important psychological problems is an old thing, in reality: it has been known for a long time.

When Moshe Talmon (1990) realized that a large number of patients, who he thought were dropouts, had actually stopped coming to therapy because that one session was enough for him, one of the first things he did was, rightly, to study the bibliography.

Surprise: many already spoke about therapies lasting only one session.

In fact, in addition to the now usual single session therapy, today as then there are other terms in the literature such as one-time therapy, short-term therapy or ultra-brief therapy, to indicate therapies of very few sessions, often only one.

Single session therapy contexts

Dove praticare la Terapia a Seduta Singola

One of the most commonly asked question is: Can single session therapy be applied to only one context?

The answer is NOT

In the previous articles dealt, we talked about “how” and “if” a Single Session Therapy could be enough to handle the critical issues of people who turn to an help service, and they also demonstrate how, according to many researches, 1 is the most frequent number of sessions.

The most frequent number of sessions in psychotherapy is 1

A random discovery

It was 1986 and Moshe Talmon was working as psychotherapist in the psychiatric department of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, Hayward, California; one of the biggest healthcare organisations of the United States.

While he was in Norman Weinstein’s (the chief) office, Talmon noticed a pile of papers reporting the writing “number of sessions for each patient for the last 12 months”.

Talmon set out to study them, and Weinstein approved.

The included data referred to the past activity of about thirty between psychiatrics, psychologists and social workers working in the clinic. In all cases, the most frequent length of the therapies was of one single session.

The first research on Single Session Therapy

La prima ricerca in Terapia a Seduta Singola 2

It is already known that psychotherapy can last one single session of therapy.

After all, also the term single session therapy had already been used. In 1981, Simon

Budman, one of the best-known scholar of brief therapies, published Forms of Brief Therapy, which included a chapter named Focused single session therapy: Initial development and evaluation written by Bernard Bloom.

In the literature research studies on therapies of a single session were also present.

What was missing was a study specifically aimed at exploring the efficacy of SST Michael Hoyt, Robert Rosenbaum e Moshe Talmon decided, therefore, to conduct the first research study on SST, from which a series of interesting results emerged.

What is Single Session Therapy? An introduction

May a single session of therapy be enough for some people?

This is the assumption from which all the studies on Single Session Therapy have proceeded, and all resulted in univocal findings: Yes, one single session of therapy may be more than sufficient.

And not only for some people. But what is Single Session Therapy (SST)?

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