Freud realized that intellectualized insight (cognitive-mediated by the left prefrontal areas) would not interrupt the repetition compulsion, i.e., could not dislodge a neurosis.  That is why he centered on the emotional living through (of the past traumas and repressed affects) in the transference (and we would add, in the countertransference).  The psychotherapeutic task must engage deep feeling-experiences encoded in subcortical and limbic areas which mediate basic safety and attachment.  "Talk therapy" is not just talk.  Klein centered on deep persecutory and depressive anxieties/guilt which were embodied.  She had an early insight into the effects of implicit/unconscious memory--she called it 'feeling in memory.'  Traumas from prenatal to postnatal periods are encoded in the amygdala--subserving unconscious implicit memory--the 'body keeps score' as many traumatologists would say.

Winnicott's fear of breakdown and use of the object papers speak to right hemispheric limbic mediation of primitive agonies and the survival and establishment of the self in conjunction with a good-enough other.  Words cannot reach and easily assuage such primitive, early, pre-symbolic pain.  Searles spoke of the need for the symptoms to become transitional phenomena for both partners in the therapeutic dialogue.

Also, a model which just focuses solely on behavioral change is leaving out the internal world and psychobiology of the person, e.g., a person may give up ETOH misuse, yet still be experiencing excessive cortisol levels in social situations, or high levels of shame or feelings of inadequacy.  Would we say this person is now healthy?

Whoever wrote the New York Times article has an 'all-or-none' and 'Hollywood' view of psychodynamic therapy, or even a computer model view of psychotherapy, involving information transfer as the curative element.  It is sad to see such uninformed viewpoints be presented in an authoritative manner.  I guess that is partly WHY there is a letters to the editor section.

Brian Koehler