Ermeneutica sistemica e intenzionalità nella conversazione terapeutica

This study is part of a bigger research program on systemic thinking and therapeutic change. In this study we explore another relevant factor of therapeutic change specific of the systemic model: the attribution of unconscious intentionality to the problematic or symptomatic behavior (Ugazio, 1984, 1985) in order to restore the patients’ sense of agency and control on their lives, undermined by the psychopathology onset. We hypothesized that symptoms are generally explained resorting to causes (hypothesis 1) and that therapists overall introduce more reasons (intentional although unconscious explanations) than patients, who tend to use more causal explanations (hypothesis 2). To test our hypotheses, we coded the degree of intentionality of the explanations concerning 2 main areas (symptoms and a significant relation issues) using 3 dimensions of the F.Ex coding system (Malle, 2000) and a brand new category (hypo-reason), we created to gauge the unconscious intentionality. We coded all the explanations concerning the 2 areas provided by patients and therapists and extracted from the verbatim transcripts of the first two (videotaped) sessions of individual systemic therapies with 12 patients. The interrater agreement between the 2 independent coders was assessed by Cohen’s K (.87). The loglinear analysis performed on explanations provided by patients and therapists mostly confirms our hypotheses. Our results offer interesting considerations regarding the clinical implications of our study