noted painful feelings about thwarted efforts at emotional closeness to parents and others in childhood. Finally, at the deepest layer of feelings are the still powerful yearnings for closeness, attachment, and love. The goal of the ISTDP therapist is, as rapidly as possible, to help the patient overcome resistance, and then experience all the waves of mixed, genuine feeling, previously unconscious, triggered by the intense therapeutic process. Those feelings are traced back to their origins in the past, and then both therapist and patient come to understand how the patient came to be the "consciously confused, unconsciously driven" person in the present. Old pockets of emotion are drained, the patient has a clearer self-narrative, and self-destructive symptoms and defences are renounced. The understanding gained is not just cognitive, but goes to the fundamental, emotional core. The influence of Freud's early trauma theory is evident. Specific therapeutic interventions Davanloo discovered the layers of the dynamic unconscious through a process of developing specific interventions which allow the therapist to reach those layers. Those interventions, applied in a specific fashion at specific times in the therapeutic process, are all calculated to overcome the patient's resistance as quickly and completely as possible, to allow the earliest and fullest experience of true feelings about the present and past as quickly as possible. Those interventions are known as pressure, challenge, and head-on collision. I. Pressure: Therapeutic encouragement and reaching through to the patient Pressure is the principal ingredient of ISTDP, and it takes many forms. Initially, pressure takes the form of encouraging the patient to describe symptoms and interpersonal difficulties as specifically as possible, so both patient and therapist get the clearest picture possible of the precise difficulties. It starts from the moment the patient walks into the room, in the form of the question, "Are there some difficulties you are experiencing which you would like us to have a look at?" The primary form of pressure is pressure toward feeling. Again, this is exerted mainly in the form of questions, such as, "How did you feel toward your boss for humiliating you in front of your staff? We see that you got anxious and depressed, but how did you feel?" Pressure can be toward the patient's will: "Can we look to your feelings? Do you want us to look to your feelings?" Pressure is also exerted toward the therapeutic task: "Our goal here, if you