Strong feeling in psychotherapy: Therapist uses and methods of promotion.
Despite the fact that many practitioners of varying theoretical stripes regard in-session strong client feeling as an important lever for psychotherapeutic change, there has been almost no research on how therapists can help bring about these strong feeling events in their sessions, or how they can use them once they have occurred. Nowhere in the current literature are there research-generated, unabridged, richly descriptive category systems designed to show practitioners precise methods for promoting strong feeling in the session, and precise ways of using it once it occurs. The present study aims to begin filling these conspicuous gaps in the literature by addressing two research questions: (1) What therapist methods, employed under what in-session client conditions, are judged as helpful in promoting strong client feeling? (2) When strong feeling occurs in the session, how do therapists use it? The research strategy will be an inductive, discovery-oriented approach, emphasizing knowledge generation, rather than explicit hypothesis-testing. The data will consist of audiotaped sessions of individual psychotherapy that contain multiple instances of strong feeling, and that are conducted by distinguished therapists representative of a broad range of therapeutic approaches. The potential value of the findings for psychotherapeutic practice is that they will offer a richly detailed collection of procedural, technical knowledge that practitioners can readily add to their therapeutic arsenals if they so wish. The findings may also enable theorizing about the relationships between therapist methods, occurrences of strong feeling, and subsequent therapist uses, and provide empirical data that future researchers may confirm and/or extend toward a more scientifically-based technology of how to promote and use strong feeling in the session.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-09, Section: B, page: 5114.
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