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Divided into three parts, this volume consists of an introduction, five research papers, and a discussion by each contributor. Four research groups in psycholinguistics were given tape recordings of two psychotherapeutic sessions and each was asked to make an independent analysis. Autonomic changes in the patient and therapist were measured during these sessions. The investigators then met, presented their analyses, and briefly discussed each other's work. The introduction explains this arrangement, presents a description of the patient and the therapy, and publishes a transcription of each of the two sessions and a table of physiological measurements.
The investigators included workers in psycholinguistics, a physiologist, several psychiatrists, and psychologists apparently acquainted with psychoanalysis or learning theory and content analysis.
The first paper, by Hans Strupp, analyzes the therapist's activities by means of the author's familiar sets of categories and intensity scales. These scales involve such items as type of therapeutic activity, the degree of inference, and the dynamic focus of the therapist's statements, his initiative, and the therapeutic 'climate'.
Jaffe analyzes the two sessions by a series of ratios which measure diversity of word choice, rate of verbal output, and the tense of the verbs. Jaffe describes what he calls dyadic analysis—consideration of verbalizations of the two interactants collectively. His paper shows careful statistical analysis. By using five-minute intervals, Jaffe attempted to measure change in his indices as the session proceeded. It is noted that his measures seem to have little relationship to his intention of analyzing the organization of the two speakers as a unit. His three indices relate to both paralanguage and language, between which Jaffe does not differentiate.