The thermodynamics of psychotherapeutic communication.

Abstract

Given five quantified measures of emotional communication within a psychotherapy session and definitions of work, force and temperature drawn from classical physics, this paper presents calculations of patient and therapist entropy using both the traditional, caloric definition and Shannon's definition, grounded in the work of Boltzmann. Our results depend on the assumption that the patient/therapist system is closed and non-dissipative. We present models for reversible heat absorption and frictional heat dissipation--within the system--which have meaning in emotional communication and psychotherapy. Both calculations of entropy produced a lawful dependence on ln(l+t), where t is time into the session in seconds. The two calculations are essentially the same, verifying in the behavioral domain a law of physics held to be true of material nature. We also verify empirically that the limiting form of the caloric entropy for a purely silent therapist replicates the Shannon entropy for an individual in a monologue. The force field that moves the representations of patient and therapist in 5-dimensional space defines an irreversible process. Thus there are moments of disequilibrium change with respect to the measured variables of emotional communication and at least one moment of disequilibrium between every return to a prior state. This moment may be creative or traumatic. The force field is non-conservative, implying the existence of modalities of heat absorption for patient and therapist which may relate to individual characteristics and reflect human psychological variety. The force field constrains motion to an ellipsoidal shell whose geometry explains the logarithmic growth of Shannon entropy and the finding that the system's absolute temperature grows linearly with respect to time. The finding that the models and methods of physics reveal a degree of lawfulness in the mental/communicative domain as compared to the material speaks strongly for the isomorphic qualities of divergent levels of nature.