During the years 1900 to 1909 Carl Gustav Jung worked at the Burgholzli Hospital, the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Zurich.  It was there that he developed the fundamentals of his later method of psychotherapy.  Today about 260 Jungian psychoanalysts are active in Switzerland; they are affiliated of the Swiss Society for Analytical Psychology (SGAP).  Around the world about 2500 psychoanalysts are practicing on the basis of Jung’s findings. The C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich located in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich was founded in 1948.  Since that time 1050 candidates from all over the world have finished its post-graduate training and received their diploma. 

Practical experience gained over several decades has shown Jungian psychotherapy to be a possible and effective treatment for a broad range of psychic disturbances and diseases.  Due to the increasing financial pressure on public health care systems the requirements for acceptance of therapeutic methods have become more specific during the last years.  Laws on public health care thus now request all therapeutic methods to provide a scientific proof of their effectiveness, expediency and efficiency (WZW) if their practitioners want their patients to receive third party payment for their treatment. 

To answer this request and to secure the further existence of Jungian psychotherapy in future – e.g. recognition and granting of a license to its professionals within the federal law on public health care that will soon be applicable and possible third party payment granted by the health insurances – the SGAP (Swiss Association of Analytical Psychology) and the Jung Institute began initiating measures to that end many years ago. In 1994 they recorded a basic documentation for the whole of Switzerland, including 3000 cases treated by 200 therapists making it possible to get a first overview of the real contribution of Jungian psychotherapy to basic psychotherapeutic care.

Later, the possibility arose to participate in a psychotherapy research project that was to examine analytical psychotherapies – and other psychotherapies based on depth psychology – in the naturalistic framework of free practice.  Most research studies are carried out under artificially restricted conditions, e.g. with regard to only one symptom of a disease.  As this research design rarely corresponds to the reality of those who suffer as in most cases several symptoms and disturbances can occur simultaneously. 

The Naturalistic Study of Long-Term Analytical Psychotherapies (PAL), supervised under the authority of Prof. Dr. med. Gerd Rudolf (University of Heidelberg), is a naturalistic process-outcome study examining the effectiveness of psychotherapies that has created a model of cooperation between several groups of researchers: Prof. Dr. med. G. Rudolf, Dr. phil. T. Grande (Heidelberg) Dr. med. W. Keller (Berlin) and Dr. med. G. Mattanza (Zurich). The Swiss PAL-Study was financed by private funds provided by SGAP and the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich.

The study empirically and systematically examined the effectiveness of Jungian psychotherapies based on the observation of treatment in private practice.  The study was set up to cause a minimum of intrusion and disturbance to the treatment.  In contrast to the so-called experimental study designs considered the “gold standard”, the professional ethics of private practice make it impossible to leave a group of patients without treatment in order to provide a control group.

During the last years the financial pressure within the public health care system has tended to favor pharmaceutical treatment, short-term psychotherapies and following therapeutic manuals granting more credence to economics.  This tendency does not give account of the fact that as social beings, humans need exchange and confrontation within a relationship, both in psychotherapy and in the context of coping with every day life.  Long-term psychotherapy is thus indispensable for correcting emotional experiences of relationship.  Disturbed patterns of relationship cannot be modified sustainably with medication or short-term therapies that may only help coping with an acute crisis or a single symptom.

The results of the study were presented by the members of the Zurich research team including Guido Mattanza, Jacqueline Hurt and Sigrid Schwandt. Furthermore, Prof. Daniel Hell (Zurich) presented a paper on “The Lost Soul in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy”; Prof. Gerd Rudolf (Heidelberg) spoke on the “Empirical Approach to an Impossible Object: The Naturalistic Study of Long-Term Analytical Psychotherapies (PAL)”; Prof. Joachim Küchenhoff (Basel) on “Analytical Psychology and its Empirical Exploration – a Critical Assessment”, and Prof. Verena Kast (Zurich) on, “Why Does Psychotherapy Need the Jungian Approach?”.