The semantics of phobic, obsessive, eating and mood disorders

Consistent with the PCT central assumption that individuals construct their world through polar meanings, some therapists, both cognitive (Guidano 1987, 1991) and systemic (Ugazio, 1998, in press), maintain that the principal psychopathologies are characterized by specific meanings. While cognitivists have focused on intra-psychic meanings, Ugazio’s family semantic polarities (FSP) concept -related to Procter’s Family Constructs (1985, 2009)- provides a constructionist perspective of meaning based on Harrè’s Positioning Theory (1999). Ugazio hypothesizes that people with phobic (PD), obsessive-compulsive (OCD), eating (ED) and mood (MD) disorders maintain their identity within a family conversation, in which the semantics of “freedom”, “goodness”, “power” and “belonging” prevails respectively. In therapeutic conversation too, they tend to centralize these semantics and to also position the therapist within them. We tested this hypothesis applying the Family Semantics Grid (FSG) (Ugazio et al, 2009) to transcriptions of the first 2 sessions for 57 individual systemic therapies (12 clients for the first 3 psychopathologies considered, 9 for MD and 12 for a comparison group with life problems). Through the FSG coding system we first extracted meanings from 3 different conversational positionings (Lucius-Hoene & Deppermann, 2000), representing 3 operationalizations of the FSP concept: a) “Narrated Semantic Polarities” (NedSP) (self/others narrated positionings) b) “Narrating Semantic Polarities” (NingSP) (self/others implicit positionings through the act of narrating) c) “Interactive Semantic Polarities” (ISP) (implicit and explicit interactive positionings between client and therapist). Moreover, we classified these meanings through the FSG grids that operationalizes the semantics of “freedom”, “goodness”, “power” and “belonging”, along with “others semantics” unconnected with the psychopathologies considered. The results we will present concern NedSP, that can be assimilated to Kelly’s personal constructs, and the ISP that capture FSP specificity. The majority of our measures confirm our clinical hypothesis.