For a Theory of the Psychotherapeutic Process: Epistemology of Recursion and Relational Fractality.

Abstract

Psychotherapy is a relational process that emerges from the meeting of two people. There is an ontological difference between the individual psychopathology of the patient and relational therapy; the present work aims to overcome the patient-centric conception of psychotherapy, restoring the dyadic nature of the therapy through the interpretation of the psychological interview as a fractal process. Recursion, namely the application of the same logical operator to the result of the operation itself, is presented here as the basic procedural element of psychotherapy. The paper is divided into two parts: The first has epistemological nature and focuses on complexity theory and cybernetics: Edgar Morin and recursion as a process of existence, Heinz von Foerster and epistemology as second-order praxis. From the thought of Gregory Bateson, it is here postulated the self-similarity of the content and structure of the mind, to the point of conceptualizing the dyadic relationship as a Mind of a different logical type compared to the individual mind. The second part of the present work introduces two intellectual tools designed to conceptualize psychotherapy as a fractal process: the psychopathological hologram, useful for clinical work although of a non-clinical nature, that consists in a fraction of the patient's experiential flow, while the psychotherapeutic string is presented here as the basic recursive element of psychotherapeutic process.