The clinical use of photography: A single case, multi-method study of the therapeutic process

Abstract

This single case study aimed at evaluating the use of a photographic technique (i.e., Spectro Cards) within an eight-session clinical intervention based on the Brief, Intermittent Psychotherapy model developed by Nicholas Cummings (1990). We hypothesized that the use of photography may increase the patient's Referential Activity (RA), facilitating the linking process between the nonverbal experience and the verbal code. Linguistic analysis of the discursive production of a 36-year-old female patient was conducted according to two different strategies: Measurement of the RA according to the coding system developed by Wilma Bucci (1997a, 1997b), and textual-linguistic analysis supported by the software T-LAB. Our findings revealed that the use of Spectro Cards during each psychotherapeutic session yielded significant changes in the patient's language, in terms of greater RA values, richer discursive production, and a switch of language focus from physical pain to psychological pain.