Project Details
Projekt
Lingustic realization of resistance in psychodynamic psychotherapy
Applicants
Professor Dr. Arnulf Deppermann; Dr. Inka Montan
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term
since 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 445514280
This interdisciplinary project aims for a better understanding of a core concept of psychodynamic psychotherapy, ‚resistance‘. It studies how resistance changes over the course of psychotherapeutic treatment, depending on therapeutic reactions and patient variables. In a mixed methods approach, which combines linguistic, conversation-analytic and psychological, psychotherapeutic methods, video-recordings and transcripts of outpatient psychotherapeutic sessions will be analyzed. On the basis of 180 complete psychodynamic therapies with depressive patients (unipolar affective disorder, patients suffering from anxiety and depressive symptoms and patients with a depressive personality disorder), linguistic realizations of resistance are identified. The immediately preceding sequences of therapeutic interaction and the therapist’s responses to resistance will also be included in the analysis. The analyses will result in a categorical matrix that allows to capture both types of realizations of resistance and types of therapeutic responses to resistance. The goal is to develop a linguistically and interactionally based typology of realizations of resistance and of forms of therapeutic responses to resistance, which can serve as a basis for inquiring into the dynamics of change of resistance over the course of psychotherapeutic treatment processes. The categorical matrix will be transformed into a coding-system, which will be used to identify changes in frequency and intensity of different types of resistance over the course of the therapeutic sessions. The issue of how resistance changes as an effect of therapeutic interventions will be studied longitudinally both qualitatively, using the approach of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, and quantitatively, using coding, questionnaire data and statistical analysis. Sessions 5, 15 and 30 will be subjected to analysis in a total of 110 therapies. It will be tested how realization of resistance and its change depends on various patient, therapist and process variables on the one hand and on therapeutic responses on the other hand. Theoretically, the project sets as ist goal to develop a linguistically and interactionally based concept of the realization of resistance and its management in psychodynamic psychotherapy. The project thus will contribute to a better understanding of how language and interaction matter for psychotherapeutic change. The relevance of the results for practice and training in psychodynamic psychotherapy will be discussed.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
