A Clinician-Research Collaboration: The Road to Ms. M.

Abstract

Clinician-researcher collaboration can delineate what clinicians from many theoretical perspectives are actually doing when they perform the specialized communication process called psychotherapy. This paper illustrates the power of connecting clinical data with measures derived from Multiple Code Theory in identifying important clinical processes and presents an invitation to clinicians to offer their own recorded contributions. I trace my journey to the Referential Activity Research Group as a clinician, that culminated with my offering a video recording of a twenty-five session brief psychotherapy to the clinician-researcher collaboration. To illustrate the yield of the collaboration, a brief orientation to the patient and three perspectives on the treatment are presented: an overview trajectory of the case, the flow of themes in a target session, and how the measures identified key moments in the target session that led to further collaboration and new measures.