Core Conflictual Relationship Theme

[Page 892]The Core Conflictual Relationship Theme (CCRT) was developed by Lester Luborsky in the late 1970s as a method to formulate systematically patients’ core conflicts or central relationship issues. The patient’s CCRT contains three components: (1) wishes, needs, or intentions (W) (e.g., “to be close and accepted”); (2) experienced or anticipated response of others (RO) (e.g., the other is “rejecting and opposing”); and (3) actual or anticipated responses of self (RS), in the form of thought, emotion, behavior, or symptom (e.g., I am “disappointed, angry, and depressed”). Interpersonal narratives about interactions between the patient and other people (called relationship episodes) extracted from transcripts of therapy sessions or from a specialized interview (called relationship anecdote paradigm) form the basis for constructing the CCRT. The CCRT components ...