Stochastic Analysis of the Duration of the Speaker Role in the Psychotherapy of an AIDS Patient

The paper presents a quantitative/stochastic study of speaker-duration data drawn from the first three sessions of a psychotherapy with an HIV-positive man. The results revealed a deep structure to the sequence of speaker durations, though signs of instability also emerged. Histograms of the frequency of utterances revealed an underlying Poisson process, and a consistency across sessions in the tendency of the patient or therapist to continue to speak and/or interrupt the other speaker. Intervention analysis identified moments of disequilibrium in these time series. Qualitative analysis revealed several causes of these periods of destabilization, including the therapist’s evident unconscious need to disrupt the speaker-duration pattern when unconsciously threatened by the patient’s encoded material.