Chair Work in Psychotherapy: An Exploratory Narrative Review

Chair Work is an experiential technique used across numerous contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches. This narrative review aims to describe how Chair Work is applied in the main therapeutic models, highlighting its procedural specificities, clinical objectives, and the state of empirical evidence. The selection of sources was conducted through a literature search in international databases and relevant texts, with analysis organized by therapeutic model. The analysis revealed that Chair Work is used in Gestalt Therapy, Schema Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, Transactional Analysis, and cognitive-behavioral approaches. Each model has distinctive procedural specificities and clinical goals, while sharing common mechanisms of action. Although promising for some approaches, the empirical evidence shows methodological gaps that require further investigation. A recent meta-analysis (Pascual-Leone & Baher, 2023) documented that chair work, when used in multiple sessions during treatment, accumulates a significant effect (d = .40) compared to treatments that do not use it. Chair Work emerges as a family of interventions characterized by applicative versatility and trans-theoretical therapeutic potential, with a need for greater methodological standardization and controlled studies to consolidate its empirical basis.

Chair Work, experiential techniques, psychotherapeutic models, clinical efficacy, trans-theoreticity

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