Open J Psychiatry Allied Sci. 2023 Aug 2. Epub ahead of print.
Therapeutic alliance: a conceptual review.
Aggarwal S, Sharma M, Priya N.
Abstract
Therapeutic alliance (TA) is the reciprocal one-to-one relationship that evolves during the patient and therapist experiences and during a variety of interpersonal mechanisms involved in psychotherapy. But very minimal recent literature discussing conceptualisation of TA is available. Literature review and qualitative comparison of information were carried out to conceptualise the development of the concept of TA using Pubmed, Medline, Google Scholar, and PsychINFO databases. The results showed that good alliance helps in the successful outcome of therapy. Therapist characteristics and behaviours like warmth, flexibility, and accurate interpretation are positively associated with alliances formation while rigidity, criticalness, inappropriate self-disclosure affect alliance negatively. Alliance literature reveals a significant lack of unanimity about how the alliance operates. But, the good alliance itself is therapeutic for clients regardless of the psychological interventions.
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