The interaction between psychoanalytic interpretations and Referential Activity

ROUSSOS, ANDRES; WAIZMANN, VANINA; ETCHENBARNE, IGNACIO

Barcelona

Congreso; 39th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research; 2008

Society for Psychotherapy Research

Aims: The study explores the interaction between the moment of formulation of interpretations in a psychodynamic psychotherapy and the patient´s referential activity as measured by the DAAP-WRAD system of Bucci and Maskit (2005), using the Spanish Weighted Referential Activity Dictionary (S-WRAD) of Roussos and O´Connell (2004). Methods: Twenty-nine sessions from a two years audio-recorded treatment were transcribed, in order to analyze the sequence of interventions and its relation with the S-WRAD. A total of 3355 interventions were analyzed independently by trained judges using the classification of interventions developed by Roussos, Waizmann & Etchebarne (2003). The interventions were studied in their session context, taking into account both the patient and the therapist’s speech, but only categorizing the therapist’s utterances. 77 interpretations were found, and the S-WRAD values at the moment of formulation were computed. Results: Most of the interventions were formulated when the RA level was higher than the mean of the patient´s RA speech, in a proportion of 1.2. But, this proportion is even higher when the intervention was an interpretation; here the proportion is 1.7. These results suggest that the type of intervention used in a treatment varies according to differences in the patient speech. These results are connected with other studies that found an interaction between intervention categories and the patient´s RA level (Dove, 2005; Roussos & Leibovich de Duarte, 2002).