Dynamics of sense-making and development of the narrative in the clinical exchange

Abstract

The present work is aimed at exploring the relationship between the dynamics of sense-making carried out by the clinical exchange and the content of the patient’s narrative. To this end the relationship between the formal and functional mapping of a psychotherapy carried out by the Discourse Flow Analysis (DFA) and the analysis of the patient’s narrative provided by the Innovative Moment Coding System (IMCS) have been compared. The comparison concerns a 15-session good outcome Emotion-Focused Therapy (Lisa's case). Findings highlight the association between the formal and functional characteristics of the clinical dialogue and the content of the narrative. More in particular, an association between the U-shape trajectory of the super-ordered meaning depicted by DFA and the evolution of the innovative content of the narrative enucleated by the IMCS were found.