Model of an Integrated Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Heart Surgery Patient

During the first few years of work of our Hamburg group, we were under the impression that we ought in future to carry out a controlled therapeutic study, with which we should be able to prove to ourselves and the heart surgeons that psychological aids for heart surgery patients in the ICU are useful. We had hoped to be able to prove one day that under the influence of psychotherapeutic treatment, postoperative psychic disturbances would occur less frequently, in a milder form, and be of shorter duration. In other words, we wanted to be able to substantiate with hard facts Kimball’s [8] supposition when he said: “We attributed our low finding of classical delirium to several factors: [1] the careful and lengthy preparation of our patients and [2] the role of the clinical investigators throughout the pre- and postoperative stages”.