Procedural Interpretation: A Method of Working Between the Lines in the Nonverbal Realm

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Notes

First presented at the 24th Annual International Conference on the Psychology of the Self (San Francisco, 2001).

Bruce Herzog is a faculty member of the Toronto Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and the Institute for the Advancement of Self Psychology. He is a council member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. He works as a psychoanalyst in private practice, Toronto, Canada.

¹Relational knowledge can be thought of as a specific type of memory that develops through the encoding of recurring early relationship experiences—but I also believe that relational interactions continue to be encoded in memory throughout life. Thus, in the psychoanalytic situation, the patient's experience of the therapist's activity can create an adjustment in relational knowledge and is an area where significant therapeutic change can occur.

²The sharing of affect with another is a selfobject experience (Herzog, 1998) that involves someone's causing their affect to be felt by another. Sufficient developmental experiences of affective sharing with caregivers imbue individuals with an internal sense of togetherness; otherwise, they journey through life feeling abandoned and alone.

³An example of the “disruption-restoration sequence” described by Wolf (1998).

⁴Bacal's Specificity Theory emphasizes careful tracking of the patient for the therapist to effect the most usable response. I believe that the therapist's attempts to provide an optimal response are experienced primarily within the procedural realm.

⁵This differentiates the “procedural interpretation” from Ogden's “interpretive action” which, although a non verbal communication, clinically does not concern itself with conveying understanding of the patient's relational knowledge. Ogden uses action to communicate the therapist's symbolic thinking to the patient. His concept appears not to involve apprehending a patient's procedural communications, nor does it attempt to facilitate procedural insight.

⁶Procedural insight could be seen as a major factor in producing the shift from old-new to new-new ways of relating in therapy. See Shane, Shane, and Gales (1997).