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A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
AIM: Psychotherapy could be interpreted as a self-organizing process which reveals discontinuous pattern transitions (so-called phase transitions). Whereas this was shown in the conscious process of awake patients by different measures and at different time scales, dreams came very seldom into the f...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7434971/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32903443 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01667 |
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author | Gennaro, Alessandro Kipp, Sylvia Viol, Kathrin de Felice, Giulio Andreassi, Silvia Aichhorn, Wolfgang Salvatore, Sergio Schiepek, Günter |
author_facet | Gennaro, Alessandro Kipp, Sylvia Viol, Kathrin de Felice, Giulio Andreassi, Silvia Aichhorn, Wolfgang Salvatore, Sergio Schiepek, Günter |
author_sort | Gennaro, Alessandro |
collection | PubMed |
description | AIM: Psychotherapy could be interpreted as a self-organizing process which reveals discontinuous pattern transitions (so-called phase transitions). Whereas this was shown in the conscious process of awake patients by different measures and at different time scales, dreams came very seldom into the focus of investigation. The present work tests the hypothesis that, by dreaming, the patient gets progressively more access to affective-laden (i.e., emotionally charged) unconscious dimensions. Furthermore, the study investigates if, over the course of psychotherapy, a discontinuous phase transition occurs in the patient’s capacity to get in contact with those unconscious dimensions. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: A series of 95 dream narratives reported during a psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a female patient (published as the “dreams of Amalie X”) was used for analysis. An automated text analysis procedure based on multiple correspondence analysis was applied to the textual corpus of the dreams, highlighting a 10-factor structure. The factors, interpreted as affective-laden unconscious meaning dimensions, were adopted to define a 10-dimensional phase space, in which the ability of a dream to be associated with one or more local factors representing complex affective-laden meanings is measured by the Euclidean distance (ED) from the origin of this hyperspace. The obtained ED time series has been fitted by an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and by non linear methods like dynamic complexity, recurrence plot, and time frequency distribution. Change point analysis was applied to these non linear methods. RESULTS: The results show an increased frequency and intensity of dreams to get access to affective-laden meanings. Non linear methods identified a phase transition-like jump of the ED dynamics onto a higher complexity level of the dreaming process, suggesting a non linear process in the patient’s capacity to get in contact with unconscious dimensions. CONCLUSION: The study corroborates the hypothesis that, by dreaming, the patient gets progressively more access to affective-laden meaning intended as unconscious dimensions. The trajectory of this process has been reproduced by an ARIMA model, and beyond this, non linear methods of time series analysis allowed the identification of a phase transition in the unconscious process of the psychoanalytic therapy under investigation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7434971 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-74349712020-09-03 A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Gennaro, Alessandro Kipp, Sylvia Viol, Kathrin de Felice, Giulio Andreassi, Silvia Aichhorn, Wolfgang Salvatore, Sergio Schiepek, Günter Front Psychol Psychology AIM: Psychotherapy could be interpreted as a self-organizing process which reveals discontinuous pattern transitions (so-called phase transitions). Whereas this was shown in the conscious process of awake patients by different measures and at different time scales, dreams came very seldom into the focus of investigation. The present work tests the hypothesis that, by dreaming, the patient gets progressively more access to affective-laden (i.e., emotionally charged) unconscious dimensions. Furthermore, the study investigates if, over the course of psychotherapy, a discontinuous phase transition occurs in the patient’s capacity to get in contact with those unconscious dimensions. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: A series of 95 dream narratives reported during a psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a female patient (published as the “dreams of Amalie X”) was used for analysis. An automated text analysis procedure based on multiple correspondence analysis was applied to the textual corpus of the dreams, highlighting a 10-factor structure. The factors, interpreted as affective-laden unconscious meaning dimensions, were adopted to define a 10-dimensional phase space, in which the ability of a dream to be associated with one or more local factors representing complex affective-laden meanings is measured by the Euclidean distance (ED) from the origin of this hyperspace. The obtained ED time series has been fitted by an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and by non linear methods like dynamic complexity, recurrence plot, and time frequency distribution. Change point analysis was applied to these non linear methods. RESULTS: The results show an increased frequency and intensity of dreams to get access to affective-laden meanings. Non linear methods identified a phase transition-like jump of the ED dynamics onto a higher complexity level of the dreaming process, suggesting a non linear process in the patient’s capacity to get in contact with unconscious dimensions. CONCLUSION: The study corroborates the hypothesis that, by dreaming, the patient gets progressively more access to affective-laden meaning intended as unconscious dimensions. The trajectory of this process has been reproduced by an ARIMA model, and beyond this, non linear methods of time series analysis allowed the identification of a phase transition in the unconscious process of the psychoanalytic therapy under investigation. Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-08-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7434971/ /pubmed/32903443 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01667 Text en Copyright © 2020 Gennaro, Kipp, Viol, de Felice, Andreassi, Aichhorn, Salvatore and Schiepek. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Gennaro, Alessandro Kipp, Sylvia Viol, Kathrin de Felice, Giulio Andreassi, Silvia Aichhorn, Wolfgang Salvatore, Sergio Schiepek, Günter A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy |
title | A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy |
title_full | A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy |
title_fullStr | A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy |
title_full_unstemmed | A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy |
title_short | A Phase Transition of the Unconscious: Automated Text Analysis of Dreams in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy |
title_sort | phase transition of the unconscious: automated text analysis of dreams in psychoanalytic psychotherapy |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7434971/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32903443 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01667 |
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