A pattern-setting therapeutic alliance study revisited

The editors of Psychotherapy Research had invited me to review my now-classic 1976 paper on the alliance and to include these topics: what that paper was about and the impact it has had on my own and other peoples' research. This paper has provided that. A brief summary follows of what the 1976 paper was about: it contained the first report of the tno new session-based alliance measures, the HAcs and the HAr. It also contained the first report of the central relationship pattern measure, the Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT). A brief summary also follows of what the 1976 paper led to: (a) a similarly composed trio of alliance measures, including the HAcs, the HAr, and the HAq-I (this has since been expanded to become the HAq-II); (b) the discovery of moderately high to high intercorrelations among the Penn alliance measures and other main alliance measures in the field (Tichenor & Hill, 1989; Tang & DeRubeis, in press; and Hatcher & Barends, 1996); and (c) considerable expansion of information about the positive predictive capacities of these and other alliance measures for the outcomes of psychotherapy.