Who was Habib Davanloo?

Habib Davanloo (1927–2023) was an Iranian-born, Canadian-trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who spent most of his career in Montreal. He held an appointment as Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and directed the Institute for Teaching and Research in Short-Term and Dynamic Psychotherapy at the Montreal General Hospital.

Trained originally in classical psychoanalysis, Davanloo grew dissatisfied with how slowly traditional analysis worked and how often it stalled against a patient’s unconscious resistance. Starting in the 1960s, he began systematically filming and reviewing his own therapy sessions — an unusual step for the time — looking frame by frame at exactly how patients defended against uncomfortable feelings, and experimenting with more direct, active ways of addressing those defenses in the room.

Over roughly two decades of this observational work, Davanloo developed what he eventually named Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP): a structured, moment-to-moment approach to helping patients access and process emotions their defenses had been keeping at a distance, often within a small number of sessions rather than years of open-ended treatment.

Founding the International Journal of ISTDP

As ISTDP developed a following among clinicians who had trained directly with Davanloo or studied his recorded sessions, the field needed a dedicated venue for case material, technique papers, and outcome research — the same way most emerging psychotherapy modalities eventually establish their own scholarly journal. Davanloo became the founding editor of the International Journal of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, which published clinical papers, transcripted session material, and research from Davanloo and the clinicians he trained through the 1990s and into the 2000s.

The journal served a specific function beyond simply spreading Davanloo’s ideas: it gave ISTDP a citable, peer-reviewed body of literature at a time when the approach was still relatively unknown outside a small circle of practitioners in Montreal and the clinicians who travelled there to train with him directly.

Why this history still matters

ISTDP today is practised and taught internationally, with training organizations and certifying bodies (including IEDTA-affiliated training programs) carrying the method well beyond Montreal. But the method’s roots — a psychiatrist reviewing his own filmed sessions in painstaking detail, and the journal that gave those observations a scholarly record — remain the reference point for understanding where the technique’s core ideas about defense, anxiety, and unlocking feeling actually came from.

1. Davanloo, H. (Ed.). Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy: Selected Papers of Habib Davanloo, M.D. Wiley.
2. International Journal of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (multiple volumes, 1990s–2000s), founding editor Habib Davanloo.