ABSTRACT
In order to assess the degree of similarity and difference in the conceptualisation of the therapeutic process by these four psychoanalytic psychotherapists from four “schools” of psychoanalytic psychotherapy—object relations, attachment-informed, existential/ phenomenological, and intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy —each psychotherapist’s commentary on the transcript of the analytic session was subjected to textual and conceptual analysis using Leximancer (Version 4.0). Leximancer is an automated content analysis software tool used to find meaning in text-based documents. Concepts are defined as sets of interrelated words that capture a central theme. Leximancer attempts to remove possible researcher bias by automatically detecting the concepts and main themes in textual data, which is examined to select a ranked list of the most significant lexical terms in the text on the basis of word frequency and co-occurrence with other concepts or categories, such as, in this study, psychotherapists from different theoretical orientations (Smith & Humphries, 2006). These terms are used to generate a thesaurus of related words that become weighted concepts.
