Rat Man - Freud’s Notes Compared Computational Analysis

The clinical case of “The man of the rats”, written by Freud in 1909 along with the notes he took during the treatment, provides a source of great interest for a critical approach to epistemological and ideological processes upon which theory and analytical technique are built. Both a macro- and micro-analysis of Freud’s treatment, carried out by Casonato and Mergenthaler (2008) with the computer-assisted text analysis software, developed to study the Therapeutic Cycle Model (TCM), showed that Freud had managed transference and countertransference with great skill and that the therapy was carried out with a technique similar to today’s therapy with relational approach. The present study, after an introduction of the case and of three instruments developed for the analysis of the narrative in psychotherapy, aims to propose an observation review resulting by the analysis over mentioned with the Therapeutic Cycle Model and to compare it with one with Atlas.ti, a qualitative text analysis software . The main purpose has been that to investigate some of the most important methods for the analysis of narrative in psychotherapy; try to find out if these instruments test similar or different constructs inside the narrative and, which among these, can be applied not only to the scripts and audio/video records of the sessions, but also to the notes of the sessions. The object of the analysis has been one of the most famous Freud’s psychotherapy, known as “The man of the rats”, a therapy carried out on a patient suffering from obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The results obtained by the Therapeutic Cycle Model and Atlas.ti agree on the fact that the therapy has been successful in terms of improving the patient’s conditions, since “emotional tone” and “abstraction”, the main variables on which the analysis has been focused, decrease. Particularly, the significant decrease of “negative emotional tone” shows, without any doubt, that the patient’s distress decreases. As regards “abstraction”, it seems that it helps to control the emotional tone; therefore where this is already low, there is also less use of abstraction. Furthermore this study shows that both instruments used can be successfully applied not only to psychotherapy audio records, but also to the notes of the sessions. However, I think that Atlas.ti offers more chances to further investigate the variables, the chance to relate them, to decompose those under investigation and, vice versa, to group them in families.