Studying the Process of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Discursive and Embodied Aspects

Abstract

This paper presents a case study that aims to further our understanding of the relational and embodied aspects of the psychotherapy process. One psychoanalytic session is examined on multiple levels, including talk, participants’ physiological arousal and interactional attunement, ruptures in the therapeutic alliance, postural congruence and facial expression of affect. Implicit processes of non‐verbal attunement seem to play a role in resolving ruptures and in fostering exploration and the creation of new meanings. Embodied attunement was found to be at its highest at points in the session characterized by verbal disjunction and ruptures in the therapeutic alliance. The therapeutic dyad was ‘in sync’ non‐verbally until tension was resolved, at which point, synchrony was relaxed, and therapist and client were able to proceed with their respective ‘tasks’, secure in the knowledge that the other is there for them. It is argued that attempts to describe the complex and nuanced processes of psychotherapeutic change would benefit from attending to both explicit/semantic and implicit/non‐verbal domains of interaction.