ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a qualitative methodological procedure for studying the mechanisms of change in psychotherapy from a dialogical perspective. The suggested methodological procedure has been developed in the context of a study aiming to map the development of group members’ voices during long-term group psychotherapy. Thematic narrative analysis was applied to 20 two-hour group therapy sessions over two years. The analysis involved identification of client and therapist voices, mapping of voices in terms of their quality as compassionate or/and reflexive, and charting the sequential organization of voices in client monologue and group members’ dialogue. Through spotting sequences between voices, as well as tracking changes in the frequency and quality of voices, we traced the development of client voices through the two years of therapy. Our findings suggest that voices that appear in the therapeutic dialogue gradually get internalized by the clients, becoming inner voices. This is particularly the case for self-compassionate voices that tend to get adopted in therapist and group members’ contributions. The suggested methodological procedure enables the systematic examination of changes in the clients’ self through therapy, contributing to the study of long-term change in psychotherapy as well as to dialogical perspectives on the self.
