The Nodes of Treatment: A Pilot Study of the Patient-Therapist Relationship Through the Theory of Complex Systems

Psychotherapy, unanimously described as a particular organized and systematic relationship between a patient and a therapist, is a real complex system. The interaction between the numerous variables belonging to the patient, the therapist and the context in which the therapeutic couple is inserted, presents auto-poietic characteristics and generates emergent qualities that, at the current state of psychotherapy research, have not been effectively addressed. The methods of machine learning are suitable for analyzing complex systems and in our opinion, at the moment, they are the most appropriate for studying the therapeutic relationship, understood as a quality emerging from patient-therapist interaction. In fact, through the use of artificial intelligence methods it is possible to construct a model of interaction between therapist and patient by integrating in it the non-linearity of information exchanges between the components of the system. The humanistic therapies vision of the patient-therapist relationship as a complex and organized interaction between the parts of a system is comparable to the networks of cellular chemical reactions described by Varela and Maturana. In these networks, which are a complex systems, what is important for maintaining the cell’s integrity and its functioning it is not the nature of every single chemical reaction but the form and dynamics of their interaction. This research is a pilot study that intends to evaluate the possibility of describing the complexity of therapeutic relationships using the methods of machine learning and complex networks, ordinarily used to study systems composed of numerous interacting variables. From this pilot study emerges that the use of graphs is certainly a valid tool for the analysis of both the psychotherapeutic sessions and the evolution of the care relationship over time. Numerous suggestions on the dynamics within the patient-therapist system emerge from the construction of a complex network useful for describing the trend of psychotherapy, which in this way can be described without losing the value of the wealth of each individual experience.