The Berlin Documentation System for Psychotherapy

A Berlin Team for Documentation in Psychotherapy has developed an extensive documentation system. It provides data of a social, psychological and life-history nature, refering to computerized dataanalysis, which are pertinent in the psychological assessment of patients with neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms. The instrument which serves in collecting the data--a special type of psychoanalytic interview--has been used routinely in the Berlin-Group since 1951 to diagnose neurotic disturbances and to prognostically assess the chances for treatment. Interest in assessment-procedures which especially take into account the social situation of the patient, and the work on documentation procedures which treat psychological and social factors with equal weight, grew out of the tradition of the Psychoanalytic Ambulance of Berlin in the years between 1920 and 1940. The following report, in treating its historical development, describes the psychoanalytic interview as well as the psychoanalytic institutions whose large amount of experience in the treatment of patients made it possible to construct the documentation system (Institut für Psychogene Erkrankungen der AOK Berlin und Abteilung für Psychotherapie und Psychosomatische Medizin im Klinikum Charlottenburg). The authors present the specific elements of the datasystem: the patient's attitude towards his illness, his actual social environment, his early socialization process, personality structure and prognosis. They discuss the relationship between the documentation on the one hand and the process of psychoanalytic interview on the other, which necessitates both the understanding of the patient's life-history and his pattern of social interaction. The possibilities and limitations of the data evaluation especially in regard to ratings are discussed in its methodological aspects. The most important questions to be answered by this project are: Testing of psychoanalytic hypotheses with help of extensive data from numerous patients, the descriptive differentiation of neurotic personality patterns, the testing of social influences on psychosomatic disorders, and the construction of a short version of documentation with which comparative research on psychotherapy should be possible.