The referential activity of therapist’s notes reveals the quality of therapeutic relationship: a possible supervision instrument

One of the indicators of a good therapeutic process is the ability of the therapeutic couple to live the patient’s emotion schemas into their relationship and to translate them into narratives on which to perform an active reorganization work. This process is a function of the couple and not just of each individual speaker. This is why we hypothesize that what the therapist says about the sessions with the patient is not only an expression of his/her personal skills but also, a capacity of the therapeutic couple to develop the referential process that connects the subsymbolic system with the symbolic one. Then we hypothesized that the referential activity of therapist’s notes – or in other words their degree of vividness, concreteness, specificity and imagery – is a measure of the interpersonal connection of the therapeutic couple and of the quality of the psychological processing they carry forward. An analysis of therapist's notes on the clinical work with a patient, by means of Multiple Code Theory computerized linguistic measures, will be presented. The results, in accordance with the literature, showed a strong connection between the linguistic properties of the therapist's notes and the effectiveness of the treatment. Therefore, the linguistic analysis of the therapist’s notes not only expands the possibilities of the clinical research, but also could be a useful support to understand and predict the evolution of the case and the type of relationship developed by the therapeutic couple. The clinician adopting this methodology in her/his professional practice can benefit from an useful tool facilitating the supervision and the reflection on the case. This tool can be considered as an "analytic third" monitoring and strengthening the referential process that connects the therapist to her/his lived emotional experience and to the patient.