Therapeutic alliance

The collaborative relationship between therapist and client, characterized by an emotional bond, agreement on therapy goals, and agreement on the tasks used to pursue them.

Working alliance: A collaborative partnership in which therapist and client agree on goals and tasks while maintaining a bond. This broader formulation names the partnership whose components define the therapeutic alliance.
Common factors theory: An account of psychotherapy that emphasizes change processes shared across different treatments. The alliance is among the shared relationship factors proposed to support change.
Edward Bordin: An American psychologist who developed a transtheoretical model of the working alliance. Bordin’s formulation made goals, tasks, and bond the alliance’s defining elements.
Alliance rupture repair: Clinical strategies for recognizing and resolving strains in the therapist–client collaboration. Repair practices address threats to goals, tasks, and bond during treatment.
Alliance–outcome correlation: The observed association between the quality of a therapeutic alliance and psychotherapy outcomes. Correlation is robust, but it does not by itself establish that alliance causes improvement.
Goal consensus: Agreement between people about the outcomes they are trying to achieve together. Shared goals are one of the alliance’s three core dimensions.
Client engagement: A client’s active participation in treatment, including attendance and involvement in therapeutic work. A strong alliance can help clients take part in therapy’s tasks.
Greenson’s working alliance: Ralph Greenson’s psychoanalytic distinction between a patient’s rational collaboration and the transference relationship. This earlier usage helped establish working alliance as a clinical concept.
Motivational interviewing: A collaborative counseling method that strengthens a person’s own motivation for change. Its partnership stance makes agreement and collaboration central to practice.
Causal inference in psychotherapy research: Methods for determining whether treatment processes cause changes in psychotherapy outcomes. Improvement can strengthen alliance as well as alliance potentially promoting improvement.

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