Abstract 

This work presents a dialogic model of psychotherapy (the Two-Stage Semiotic Model, TSSM) with discourse flow analysis (DFA) and a low-inferential method of analysis based on it. TSSM claims that in good-outcome psychotherapy, the patient’s system of meanings follows a U-shaped trend: First, it decreases, and then the dialog promotes new meanings. DFA represents a session’s dialog as a “discourse network” made by the associations for temporal adjacency between contents; then it studies the network’s dynamic properties. DFA has been applied to the textual corpus obtained from the verbatim transcript of a 15-session psy- chotherapy course. Findings are consistent with the hypotheses.

Salvatore, S., Gelo, O., Gennaro, A., Manzo, S., Radaideh, A. (2010). Looking at the psychotherapy process as an intersubjective dynamic of meaning-making: A case study with discourse flow analysis. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 23, 195-230. Link