Until now, in comparison to psychiatric day clinics, there is only a limited amount of psychotherapeutic day clinics which offer an intense, multimodal treatment on a psychodynamic basis comparable to that of inpatient settings. We present the example of the day clinic in Freiburg to discuss characteristic aspects of the setting and criteria for indication. Preliminary empirical results indicate, that even severely disturbed patients can be adequately treated. The combination of an intense therapy program with the daily involvement in the outside reality has substantial advantages for some groups of patients and eases the transition at discharge.