ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the potential of the Representation of the Therapeutic Dialogue Coding System (RTDCS), as well as its operational definitions, scoring principles, and instructions. In order to classify variations in patients' narrative accounts of their interpersonal experiences in therapy, the RTDCS was constructed from the verbatim texts of the Schedule of Therapy Remembered (STR). Recalled RTDs are reconstructed versions of dyadic exchanges that are remembered as having taken place during the course of therapy. Imagined RTDs are ways of remembering fantasies or suppositions about the therapeutic relationship. The relationship scenarios of specific RTDs enable us to identify whether discrete events within sessions, or particular sessions were, from the patient's point of view, decisively influential in determining the course of therapy. Composite RTDs merge ostensibly distinctive and diverse experiences into some sort of "averaged typical instance". RTDs that are infused with these phenomenological and functional properties are deemed introjects and are scored as either benign or problematic.
