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.
Psychotherapeutic work must take into consideration specific cognitive structures that are revealed by patients' different use of signs. In examples of clinical work with patients having emotionally bound conflicts, the relationship
between the occurring emotions (as “natural” signs) and structurally different articulatory-symbolizing signs is shown to be one of reciprocal influence. The symbolizing signs make possible a connection with, and a reference back to, intra-and intersubjective experience, as well as to inner and outer contexts. In this way, the borderline area between occurring emotions and experienced emotions, and their relation to inner and outer object representations (empathy), can be more easily bridged by means of a careful discrimination of sign processes. If, on the other hand, a dichotomizing and generally evaluating approach (emotion or speech) is adopted, this results in important questions about the ability to make connections, and about the reciprocal influence of intersubjective communication processes being discussed only within a very narrow framework. This represents a loss for our clinical and theoretical work.