Post-rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy: What Is It And How Does It Help Patients?
Post-rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy is a type of therapy developed in the 90s by the Italian neuropsychiatrist Vittorio Guidano It is framed within a constructivist perspective, which understands that we construct reality in a unique and personal way.
Thus, there would be as many realities as there are people. This therapy also gives a lot of importance to personal identity and language. In this article we will learn about its general characteristics, as well as Guidano’s ideas and some of the techniques that he uses through his model.
Post-rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy was created by Vittorio Guidano throughout his life; approximately, from the 70s to 1994. It is considered a type of cognitive but also constructivist therapy, in which the therapeutic relationship is understood as “from expert to expert.” Its main objective is for the person to be able to build their own identity through different strategies that we will see below
This type of therapy is used as a clinical psychological intervention, and in turn constitutes a theoretical school in psychology. This school follows a theoretical model that defends that human beings try to create a certain continuity in the sense of themselves and their personal history, through a coherent and flexible narrative identity. This identity can be seen reflected in narrative elaborations that the patient develops.
The ideas of Vittorio Guidano
Vittorio Guidano was born in Rome in 1944, and died at the age of 55 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was a renowned neuropsychiatrist, and in addition to creating Postrationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy, he also created the Systemic Procedural Cognitive Model Thus, his theoretical orientation was fundamentally cognitive and constructivist. However, unlike previous cognitivism, in Guidano’s theory the same author exalts emotions above cognition.
It is worth mentioning, however, that the current of post-rationalism begins with V. Guidano together with his colleague Giovanni Liotti, who in 1983 published the book “Cognitive Processes and Emotional Disorders”. But what does post-rationalism mean?
This current, created by Guidano, and where Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy is located, tries to go beyond the external, real and rational world Thus, this constructivist current is based on the idea that knowledge is created through the interpretation of reality, and a series of subjective aspects in the processing of information and the world around us.
Levels
In Guidano’s Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy Two levels are proposed in which all human experience develops The objective of this therapy, as well as of the therapist, will be to work between these two levels (which involve the experience and the explanation of the experience).
These levels “exist” or operate simultaneously, and are the following:
1. First level
The first level consists of the immediate experience that we experience, and which is made up of a set of emotions, behaviors and sensations that flow unconsciously.
2. Second level
The second level of human experience consists of the explanation we give to immediate experience; That is, how do we order, understand and conceive this reality?
Self-observation
On the other hand, Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy promotes a very specific working method, which focuses on self-observation by the patient. Self-observation is a technique that allows the person to “see themselves from the outside” and reflect on their behavior, thoughts and attitudes.
Besides, This technique also allows us to discriminate two dimensions of oneself : on the one hand, the “I as immediate experience”, and on the other, the “me”, which is the explanation that the person develops about himself through language.
Furthermore, self-observation, a central strategy of Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy, allows the person to explore their own experience, as well as construct alternative meanings to understand and name what they are feeling.
The meanings that the person constructs in relation to their reality and their life experience arise as a result of the person in a certain way “ordering” their reality. On the other hand, it will be convenient for her to feel reality as something continuous that is happening to her, in coherence with herself.
The self: personal identity
Thus, in relation to the above and the process of self-observation, we find that V. Guidano in his Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy places a lot of importance on personal identity (the objective of therapy), which is the same as the concept of “self”, and which is understood as a complex cognitive-affective system, which allows the person to evaluate (and re-evaluate) their experience globally or partially. .
The patient does all this according to an image he has of himself (a conscious image), which he assimilates through language and experiences.
Relationship with levels
We can relate the concept of the self with the levels of human experience, previously discussed Thus, at the first level of immediate experience, we would find the specific situations that the person experiences, and lives with an internal sense of continuity. All of this, as we have already seen, is experienced automatically and not consciously.
As for the second level, however (the level of explanation), we find the explanation we give to the experience and the image we have of ourselves. This image is built by the person throughout their life. The therapy will also focus on making it coherent with the person’s values and consistent over time (so that the patient can form a vital “continuum”).
On the other hand, self-observation is developed through another technique that is found within the self-observation process itself: the Moviola Technique
The name of the technique refers to the first machine that allowed films to be edited on film (moviola), and is explained through a metaphor with this object. But how is the moviola technique applied?
Steps
Let’s see how it is applied through each of its steps:
1. Panoramic view
First, the patient is trained to learn to divide a particular experience into a sequence of scenes, thus obtaining a kind of panoramic view.
2. Reduction
Subsequently, you are helped to enrich each scene with details and with various sensory and emotional aspects.
3. Amplification
Finally, the patient must reinsert the scene (or scenes), already enriched, into the sequence of his or her life story. In this way, when the patient sees himself, both from a subjective and objective point of view, he can begin to construct new abstractions and alternative ideas about himself and his life experience.
Structure the emotional experience
Finally, Another component of Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy is the structuring of the emotional experience To structure everything that we are experiencing, the use of language will be essential. This will allow us to organize the experience and structure it in sequences, as we have already seen in the moviola technique.
In addition, it will also help us separate the different components of said experience (knowledge component, emotional component…). Thus, within Post-Rationalist Cognitive Psychotherapy, the narrative structure of human experience is actually a network of experiences that we live, assimilate and interconnect with each other to end up forming personal identity.
