Forty-three outpatients with DSM-IH-R (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd Ed., revised; American Psychiatric Association, 1987) panic disorder were randomly assigned to receive 6 sessions of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), the same treatment but omitting the eye movement, or to a waiting list. Pbsttest comparisons showed EMDR to be more effective in alleviating panic and panic-related symptoms than the waiting-list procedure. Compared with the same treatment without the eye movement, EMDR led to greater improvement on 2 of 5 primary outcome measures at posttest. Howeva; EMDR's advantages had dissipated 3 months after treatment, thereby failing to firmly support the usefulness of the eye movement component in EMDR treatment for panic disorder.Although eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) was originally developed as a treatment for traumatic memories (Shapiro, 1989(Shapiro, , 1991, it has since been rapidly adopted for a wide variety of problems, particularly anxiety disorders other than posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Shapiro, 1995). In several randomized clinical trials, researchers tested EMDR's effects for PTSD-related symptoms. EMDR proved to be more beneficial than a no-treatment control (Olasov-Rothbaum, in press;Wilson, Tinker, & Becker, 1995; but see Jensen, 1994) and a placebo treatment (Scheck, Schaeffer, & Gillette, in press). Comparisons with legitimate alternative treatments for PTSD yielded largely equivocal results (Boudewyns & Hyer, in press; Boudewyns, Stwertka, Hyer, Albrecht, & Sperr, 1993;Vaughan et al., 1994). However, interventions were too brief to adequately deliver alternative treatments, not allowing us to determine with confidence whether EMDR was equivalent in efficacy to the comparison treatments. Whether EMDR is as or more beneficial than existing validated treatments for PTSD (e.g., prolonged exposure, stress inoculation