You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Enrico Jones is a clinical theorist who rests his claims on empirical grounds. He does so in a serious and clear, moderately toned, but ultimately unabashed effort in the recently published Therapeutic Action: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Therapy. Its overt purpose is to present a theory of how therapy makes for change, but it also is a how-to guide for doing psychoanalytically informed treatment.
Its central construct is the interaction structure, a concept drawn from the relational emphasis in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, yet solidly anchored as an observable in audio- and video-tapes of sessions. An interaction structure is a specific, repetitious pattern of mutually influencing moves between analyst and patient throughout the treatment, identifiable as such by outside observers (and potentially by the therapy dyad in real time). In everyday clinical talk, an interaction structure is a given transference-counter-transference pattern that keeps recurring throughout the given case.
A major portion of therapeutic change, according to Jones, depends on the extent to which the major interaction structures are experienced, interpreted, and understood in a treatment context. In this view the power of both interpretations and interpersonal interactions to effect change are linked, and lead Jones to the claim of a “pantheoretical perspective,” one compatible with almost all the psychoanalytic paradigms (intersubjective, neo-Kleinian, relational, and ego psychological). What permits this overarching of theories is that his research instruments, principally the Psychotherapy Process Q-sort (PQS), carry no language of diagnosis or technique specific to the different paradigms. Its one hundred descriptor items are brief narratives that target the form (mostly) and content of interventions, responses, interactions, and transference-countertransference moments that a clinician-judge evaluates in the actual record of the treatment.