Brief notes on text analysis in psychoanalytically oriented clinical psychology

Abstract

Words are the primary means of sharing mental contents; the body communicates, but it is the word that renders the exact idea accessible. In psychoanalysis, the analysis of words becomes the basis for theory and intervention: it studies what is said and how it is said, including what may remain unsaid, hidden, or tacit, allowing the capture of affective tonalities and the speaker’s intentions. In the psychoanalytic setting, the patient–analyst dialogue is the central text from which reedited or new meanings emerge. The analyst traces the multiple significances of words, and explores affective tone: choice of lexicon, synonyms, superlatives, vocabulary evolution, and relationships among words used by the patient. Matte Blanco proposes a bi-logic mind that encompasses both distinction (rational logic) and the dissolution of differences into symmetric relations. This theoretical perspective enables a deep exploration of both the therapeutic dialogue and texts/discourses that are produced collectively and serve the function of representing socialized emotions and affective symbolizations of the context. The present contribution offers a proposal for systematic text analysis within a psychoanalytic theoretical framework, grounded in statistical and computational devices employed in contemporary literature on the analysis of textual corpora.