We present three current, complementary formulations of the assimilationmodel: (a) the schema formulation, based on cognitive developmentalconcepts; (b) the voices formulation, in which assimilation is understoodas the construction of a meaning bridge between active internal voices;and (c) the cognitive science formulation, which uses cognitive conceptsof memory types to understand the failure of memory in cases of warded-off and avoided experiences. These views of assimilation are used to under-stand the varied functions that narratives (stories about real or imaginedevents outside of therapy) may play in psychotherapy, including narrativesthat avoid encounters with threatening material, narratives that approachsuch material indirectly or symbolically, narratives by which clients reexpe-rience trauma, and narratives that help construct a mature understanding.© 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Clin Psychol 55: 1213–1226, 1999.

Some functions of narrative in the assimilation of problematic experiences.

Trauma history and personal narratives: Some clues to coping among survivors of child abuse

Objective: The present work aims to detect the role of the rate of speech as a mechanism able to give information on patient’s intrapsychic activity and the intersubjective quality of the patient–therapist relationship. Method: Thirty clinical sessions among 5 patients were sampled and divided into idea units (N = 1276) according to the referential activity method. Each idea unit was rated according to referential activity method and in terms of speech rate (syllables per second) for both patient and therapist. A mixed-effects model was applied in order to detect the relationship between the speech rate of both the patient and the therapist and the features of the patient’s verbal production in terms of referential activity scales. A Pearson correlation was applied to evaluate the synchrony between the speech rate of the patient and the therapist. Results: Results highlight that speech rate varies according patient’s ability to get in touch with specific aspects detected through referential activity method: patient and the therapist speech rate get synchronized during the course of the sessions; and the therapist’s speech rate partially attunes to the patient’s ability to get in touch with inner aspects detected through RA method. Conclusion: The work identified speech rate as a feature that may help in the development of the clinical process in light of its ability to convey information about a patient’s internal states and a therapist’s attunement ability. These results support the intersubjective perspective on the clinical process.

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Beyond Verbal Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of Speech Rates in Psychotherapy Sessions.

Competent agency is a basic assumption of psychoanalytic change. Yet as an aspect of health, personal agency has in the main been only intuitively addressed and remains clinically unsystematized. H...

Agency as a Psychoanalytic Idea

Poststructuralist interpretation of the psychoanalytic relationship

The task of the psychoanalytic researcher is in part to verify what the clinician already knows. For much of what the researcher finds the response of the clinician must be, “I knew that all along.” But the goal of research must also be to discover what we have previously had no access to, and what we seem to know, but wrongly. You can see that the work of the researcher is in some respects like that of the patient as well as the therapist. All participants in the psychoanalytic enterprise are attempting to detect psychic structures that have previously been unrecognized. At all levels, the achievement of new knowledge, the “surprise”, depends on the articulation of connections and associations so that gaps can be uncovered and ambiguities resolved.

Wilma Bucci

Papers

Converging Evidence for Emotional Structures: Theory and Method