The multiple levels of interaction within the therapeutic communication: theory and research

Starting form the description of the personal experience that brought her to develop her model, the Author presents the key points of her multiple code theory, integrated and updated with the most recent acquisitions of the cognitive sciences and the psychotherapeutic models. The paper describes the features of the three principal levels of human emotive information processing - sub-symbolic, non-verbal symbolic, symbolic verbal - and the variety of modality-specific codes through which the interaction with the world is experienced. Within this new theory the Author defines concepts and crucial clinical processes like the emotions patterns, the interactive sequences that bring to their formation and re-activation during the therapeutic communication, the interactive and subjective processes that bring to the persistence of painful emotion patterns or the incessant modification of those that create well-being. Lastly, the Author describes the referential process that connects the various levels of emotive information elaboration, both in the day to day contest and during psychotherapy, where the phases odf activation, symbolisation and re-organisation/reflection alternate circularly. The Author concludes highlighting the incarnated and relational nature of this process, as well as its risks and paradoxes.