The interaction between types and themes of interventions in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. A single case study

O'CONNELL, MANUELA; ETCHENBARNE, IGNACIO; WAIZMANN, VANINA; FRAIMAN, DANIEL; ROUSSOS, ANDRES

Edimburgo, Escocia

Conferencia; 37th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. From Research to Practice; 2006

Society for Psychotheraoy Research

The aim of this study is to characterize the interaction between the types of the interventions and the theme addresses by those interventions. Themes are represented by content units ategorized in the classification of interventions developed by Roussos, Waizmann & Etchebarne (2003). 29 sessions from a two years audio-recorded psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy were transcribed and analyzed in order to asses this interaction. The totals of interventions were analyzed independently by three trained judges. The classification divides the content level in 17 categories and the descriptive level in 24 categories. The interventions were studied in their session context, taking into account both patient and therapist’s speech, but only categorizing the therapists utterances. Results show that the contents associated with interpretation are primarily oriented to: interpersonal situation, family situation, mental processes and therapeutic relationship. On the other hand, the therapist uses signaling with a much broader variety of contents. Not only includes mental processes, interpersonal situations, and family situations (less than in interpretation) but also interventions associated with factual situations. Results also suggest that the transition probability between interventions and interpretation are content dependent. The association between signaling and interpretation is higher when the therapist interprets about mental processes. In the case of the interpretation about interpersonal situation signaling is not observed as the previous intervention.