Narration and Discourse in the Clinical Dialogue

The authors analyze the nature of the clinical dialogue as a product of the signification processes working in the clinical relationship. This subject is discussed from a psychodynamic perspective enriched by encounter/confrontation with recent progress in semiotics. The authors, considering some contribution from semiotics, discuss the process of sense generation, and highlight the function of the different axis of sense production, with particular attention on the role of emotion in sense generation as hinted by the recent contribution on the pathemic axis. Among the various forms of discourse, the contribution focuses on narration. The narrative text produced within the clinical dialogue is not considered symptomatic of the inner world of the client, but rather it emerges as a product of the process of interpretative collaboration. From this consideration, the authors investigate which criteria are useful to orient the interpretative collaboration toward the production of knowledge in the clinical dialogue. This is a question that the hermeneutic perspective does not resolve and that has often earned it the accusation of relativism or of an aesthetic drift. The authors find in the concept of intentio operis, proposed by Umberto Eco, a fundamental restraint and direction to the infinite unfolding possibilities of the interpretative and transformative process in the clinical relation. In a psychological perspective, the intentio operis constitutes a relational proposal: the context, the matrix of meanings, within which it is possible to explore the interpretative collaboration, the client problem, and its story. In this sense, the narration functions as a relational proposal, as organizer of the specific and contingent ties of reciprocity and at the same time reactualizes, in the hic et nunc of the narrative exchange, models of symbolization relative to the relationship between the narrator and the context of the narrated experience.