Narratives of Dreams and Waking Thoughts: Emotional Processing in Relation to the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic posed a significant challenge to the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of each individual. It also brought the importance of daily emotional management for survival to the forefront of every human being. Our study aims to explore whether emotional processes perform different functions during waking thoughts and night dreams during the first lockdown in Italy. Utilizing Multiple Code Theory (MCT), our goal is to verify whether waking thoughts facilitate a functional disconnection in order to manage the trauma caused by COVID-19. Two online forms were distributed to random participants in the general population, presenting a total of 49 reports of night dreams (23 males; mean age 33.45 ds. 10.12; word mean 238.54 ds. 146.8) and 48 reports of waking thoughts (25 males; mean age 34.54 ds. 12.8; word mean M. 91 words ds. 23). The Referential Process linguistic measures and Affect Salience Index were utilized. It was found that Affect Salience is present in both dreams and in waking thoughts; however, Referential Activity was higher in dreams and Reflection and Affect words were higher in waking thoughts. Two different processes of emotional elaboration emerged. The results highlight the use of greater symbolization processes during dreams and a higher emotional distance in waking thoughts. These results confirm that during the nocturnal processes, there is greater contact with the processing of trauma, while during the diurnal processes, defensive strategies were activated to cope with and manage life via a moment of the defensive disruption of daily activities.

Analytic Process and Linguistic Style: Exploring Analysts’ Treatment Notes in the Light of Linguistic Measures of the Referential Process

This paper presents a comparison between a clinical evaluation and a computerized linguistic analysis of the treatment notes of the first two years of an analysis conducted four sessions a week with the patient lying on a couch. Clinical notes had been written as part of the analyst’s standard practice after every session, some years prior to the planning of this study. The notes describe the analytic interchange and the analyst’s internal thoughts. The linguistic analysis focuses on two analytically relevant linguistic variables: Referential Activity (RA), a measure of the degree of connection between emotional processing and language, and Reflection, the use of words referring to thoughts. The examination of the linguistic measures point to overlooked parts of sessions which may be clinically significant. In particular, the examination of the clinical material during the nodal points of the first summer break, where significant changes in the linguistic measures were seen, provided clinical understanding of the analytic work that was not explicitly noted at the time of treatment. This method has the potential to be utilized in ongoing treatments and to improve the supervisory process.

Stimulus Features of the Object Relations Technique Affecting the Linguistic Qualities of Individuals’ Narratives

Previous studies on projective techniques have investigated the effects of variation in stimulus features on individuals’ response behavior. In particular, the influence of chromatic colors and form definition on the images elicited by the stimuli has been tested. Most studies have focused on the Rorschach and TAT and have examined effects in terms of variables such as reality testing and reactions to perceptual details. This is the first study to examine the effects of variation in visual stimuli as represented in features of the Object Relations Technique (ORT) cards on linguistic indicators of connection to emotional experience using measures of the referential process. The ORT was administered to 207 Italian non-clinical participants to explore effects of color, form and content variation on language style. The sample was stratified by age, gender, marital status and education to be representative of the Italian population. The stories told in response to the card images were rated using computerized linguistic measures, including the Weighted Referential Activity Dictionary—Italian version (IWRAD) which indicates the degree to which language is connected to nonverbal experience, and the Weighted Reflection/Reorganization List—Italian version (IWRRL) which detects a linguistic style of personal re-elaboration of emotional experience. The results provide support for the color-affect and form-reality testing hypotheses. Cards with better form definition, including color definition, and with fewer silhouettes of people elicited responses that were higher in IWRAD and lower in IWRRL, and also higher in the degree to which the two measures varied together. Implications of the results for use of ORT in clinical assessment and intervention are discussed.

The Other Hegel: The Anthropology and Spirit’s Birth from within the Bio‑Material World

This chapter functions as a preparatory overview of Part II as a whole. First, it historically contextualizes Hegel’s speculative anthropology in terms of developments in empirical psychology and anthropology from the period; second, it emphasizes the ways in which Hegel was fascinated throughout the course of his philosophical activity by the perplexing question of how anything resembling the free self-referential activity of spirit might emerge from within the coordinates of blind material nature. Simultaneously, it emphasizes not only the significant role Hegel assigned to the results of empirical inquiry but, more importantly, the thorough-going materialism operative in his analysis of the genesis of finite subjectivity. In this sense, the chapter develops a portrait of the other Hegel: one concerned with materialism, science, embodiment, and various forms of pathology which permeate the life of subjectivity.

Referential activity, dissociation, psychopathology and psychotherapy

Within the framework of the research on process in psychotherapy, Wilma Bucci has initiated an attempt to reformulate and widen metapsychological concepts as well as the scope of psychoanalysis towards the contents of neuroscience and cognitive science. Such intent has contributed in developing the multiple code theory: a theoretical-empirical basis for the development of a research method on the evaluation of referential activity – measure of the therapy’s global progress through the transcriptions of the sessions. The method ranks in the course of the research on process and stems, as many empirical methods of therapeutic change evaluation, from the crisis of Freud’s metapsychology, documented by the various controversies on the theory of the mind at the basis of psychoanalytic practice. From such controversies, it was acknowledged that psychoanalysis requires a modern theory explaining the fundamentals of clinical practice. Bucci’s theory represents a development of Freud’s differentiation of primary and secondary process: two distinct modes of thought that cannot be proposed in modern reality, since their validity has not been proven yet. Bucci proposes, instead, a three-fold thought and memory organization including verbal symbolic, non-verbal symbolic and sub-symbolic modes of thought. The integration of such modes should accompany the individual in every daily situation, by appearing in his/her language; an example, within psychotherapy, is the patient’s free associations. Following traumatic situations, the three systems of thought may not function in an integrated manner: in this sense, psychotherapy may represent the instrument to restore the combined functioning of the three systems.

The Clinical Use of Photography: A Single Case, Multimethod Study of the Therapeutic Process

This single case study aimed at evaluating the use of a photographic tech-nique (i.e., Spectro Cards) within an eight-session clinical intervention based on the Brief, Intermittent Psychotherapy model developed by Nicholas Cummings (1990). We hypothesized that the use of photography may increase the patient’s Referential Activity (RA), facilitating the linking process between the nonverbal experience and the verbal code. Linguistic analysis of the discursive production of a 36-year-old female patient was conducted according to two different strategies: Measurement of the RA according to the coding system developed by Wilma Bucci (1997a, 1997b), and textual-linguistic analysis supported by the software T-LAB. Our findings revealed that the use of Spectro Cards during each psychotherapeutic session yielded significant changes in the patient’s language, in terms of greater RA values, richer discursive production, and a switch of language focus from physical pain to psychological pain.