The sexual abuse of children and adolescents remains a significant problem worldwide. Children and adolescents who have been sexually abused often experience a wide range of psychological, social and physical problems and these problems often follow them into adulthood.
Treatments based on psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapy are often provided to victims of sexual abuse. These treatments work on the idea that difficulties in past relationships or experiences are often pushed into the unconscious, but later re-emerge in the form of problems in the present. Through a relationship with a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapist, the person is helped to gain a greater conscious understanding of their unconscious conflicts and this is thought to help them recover. A recent review, co-registered with both Campbell and Cochrane, sought to examine the effectiveness of these treatments.
The review authors, Ben Parker and William Turner did not find any studies of this kind of therapy that met the strict inclusion criteria for this review. As a result, they could not draw any conclusions as to the effectiveness of psychoanalytic/ psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents who have been sexually abused. The implications of this lack of evidence for research and clinical practice are discussed. High quality randomized controlled trials should be conducted, but future systematic reviews on this subject may need to consider including other lower quality evidence in order to avoid overlooking important research.