Study of a short-term treatment through referential activity linguistic measures

The purpose of the present article is to evaluate in this successful clinical case the Referential Process (Bucci, 1997) in the whole course of the therapeutic process. Objectives: The goals of the study are: to explore the linguistic interaction between patient and therapist; and to analyze specific linguistic patterns marking symbolization and reorganization phases during the sessions. Method: The whole treatment is composed of 14 sessions, each session was transcribed verbatim, all sessions were processed by DAAP software and the following Italian computerized linguistic measures of the referential process were applied: Positive Affects, Negative Affects, Sum Affects, Reflection, Disfluency, Referential Activity Dictionary. Results: The analysis of patient and therapist interactions show a specific linguistic pattern, based on a verbalization of Negative Affects. Through cluster analysis, the whole treatment shows two specific phases; the first is at the beginning when a deep emotional involvement rapidly emerges, along with a high symbolization phase; followed by the second phase characterized by closure and reduction of emotional connections. A specific session “number 7” was also analyzed because of it showed a major pattern change.