**1. Introduction**

Twenty years ago, the idea of superiority of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) was dominated in the evidence-based approach. The exponential growth in evidence-based research on psychotherapy had fundamentally changed the situation. Modern meta-analyses and systematic reviews indicate a lack of benefits in the effectiveness of various CBT techniques, psychodynamic therapy, and supportive psychotherapy for a wide range of posttraumatic, anxiety, and depressive disorders. Researchers note only the traditionally wide representation of the CBT methods, but do not indicate their therapeutic advantage, stating the reliable effectiveness of different psychotherapies [1–4]. The effect sizes for CBT, psychodynamic therapy, relaxation training, non-directive therapy, self-evaluating therapy, mindfulness meditation, psychodynamic and metacognitive therapies, anxiety management training for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) ranged from moderate to high (r = 0.76).

The distinct and comparable effectiveness of a wide range of psychotherapy methods stimulates researchers to explore the general, universal mechanisms of psychotherapy. In recent years, evidence-based studies of psychotherapy have gone beyond the standard for assessing effectiveness, switching to the study of the psychologic and neuronal mechanisms of psychotherapy. The number of studies of psychotherapy psychologic and neuronal (f-MRI-, s-MRI-based) mechanisms over the past decade has increased five times—for psychometric, and more than 10 times—for neuronal methods. Based on f-MRI-, s-MRI-based studies of the neuronal mechanisms, different psychotherapy methods have shown the involvement of brain areas responsible for self-awareness, self-regulation, regulation of attention, self-perception, semantic processes [5, 6].

Widespread methods of psychotherapy have a limited (40–100 years) life cycle: formation, development, maturity, decline, and loss of relevance. The methods of psychotherapy are grouped into psychotherapeutic approaches that are more historically stable in comparison with separate methods. The methods of psychotherapy, which became the basis for the formation of psychotherapeutic approaches, as a rule, live longer than others. Orthodox psychoanalysis [7–13] and A. Beck's cognitive therapy [14–16] can serve as canonical illustrations. The historicity of the psychotherapeutic methods presupposes their involvement in the historical process, conditioned by social changes, while within the psychotherapy the personified narrative of its methods development dominates (one of the examples is the relatively recent history of Ericksonian hypnosis [17–19]).

Any developed and demanded method of psychotherapy creates and maintains hermeneutic semantic structure, explaining a person, disorder, and therapy. The problem is that psychotherapeutic hermeneutics of the methods are not consistent (for example, for psychodynamic and behavioral therapy), which does not affect the comparable clinical effectiveness of the methods.

The data of evidence-based studies of psychotherapy, the aspect of its historicity, comparison of the interpretative constructs of separate methods potentiate the search for common, universal mechanisms of psychotherapy, and their direct use in psychotherapeutic practice. Based on the above logic, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the author elaborated the three-component, structural-dynamic theory of psychotherapy, which in the 2010s turned into the basis for development of the positivedialog psychotherapy (PDP) method that underwent an evidence-based assessment, highlighting predictors of its efficiency.
