This comes from the Australian Psychological Society and is a summary of the Evidence based effective treatments for various psychological conditions. This is all about the strict empirical scientific approach to assessing treatment effectiveness. If you are looking for strong scientific evidence for a treatment style then this has it.
The APS certainly has its short comings as do most (all) professional associations. At times they have more concern for their own well being than the client. (However that discussion is for another time.) The APS is however very good at knowing and presenting the scientific evidence on such matters. These guys eat, sleep and **** the scientific method. This is a very reliable resource on the current scientific evidence for the effectiveness of psychotherapy treatments.
Level 1 is the highest quality of evidence and level 4 is the lowest quality but the evidence exists nonetheless.
Now scientific evidence on things such as effectiveness of psychotherapies may not exist for a number of reasons.
1. It simply has never been research or has been researched very little. There maybe very few effective therapies on eating disorders because no one has ever got around to researching it. Much scientific research rests on getting funding which means then of course it then becomes political. If an area is not seen as politically good then there is going to be very little money around to fund research on that.
2. Some therapies are much easier to research than others. The prime example is CBT. That therapy is designed to be able to be researched using the scientific method. So there is going to be much more research on it because its easier to do and easier to get a positive result. Research on relational TA is much harder to do because how can you ever quantify a relationship so it can be researched and shown to be effective.
So just because a therapy does not exist or is seen very little on this chart does not mean it is not effective. It may mean that science simply cannot understand it.
As you can see psychodynamic therapy does quite well. This is a good result because the way they define psychodynamic therapy here, is not a system that is going to be easily researched especially compared others like CBT or DBT. For it to get on this chart is going to be much harder than some others, not because it is less effective but because it is harder to research to get a positive result.
Psychodynamic therapy as defined here would included things like short term classical TA and redecision TA plus the use of transference. Original Goulding redecision would not fit the definition of psychodynamic therapy here because of their non use of transference. However it would fit for what I call redecision relational TA where redecision approach has included transference into its theory and treatment style.