Research
Studying what happens without losing its meaning.
Research questions arise from practice and from curiosity about the processes that run through experience. They concern clinical work, but also supervision, training and group dynamics. Qualitative research makes it possible to follow how these processes unfold and what they mean to those involved, in dialogue with quantitative tools.
A position on research
The researcher is part of the research.
The researcher is the instrument through which a part of the phenomenon is selected and the data are read. Their presence runs through the entire study design, from the question to the way the collected material is approached. The point beyond which the findings cannot take us also depends on their choices. The researcher is responsible for those choices.
Rigour in qualitative research requires every step, from the question to the interpretation, to be traceable in its reasoning and development, and open to discussion. Conclusions need to remain proportionate to what the method and the material can actually support.
Studying Gestalt requires a method and tools suited to its experiential nature, capable of preserving subjectivity and the uniqueness of processes.
If it is turned into a sequence of techniques or a protocol that is the same for everyone, a fundamental part of the clinical work disappears from observation.
Manifesto
From practice to the question, and back
Many questions arise from clinical practice. Others come from the experience of supervision or teaching. Research can make them precise enough to be studied; the findings then return to the places where the questions arose and may change the work.
Change has more than one measure
A person may suffer less and change their relationship with their world and their own feelings. Their choices may also change, as may their behaviour. These movements do not always follow the same timescale. Deciding what to observe already means choosing which changes we consider important.
Perspectives that take part
The same session can affect the patient and the therapist differently. Looking at it from both perspectives shows where their accounts meet and where they diverge. It also brings out aspects that each account, taken separately, leaves in the background. The place of these positions in the research needs to remain visible.
Different methods for different questions
A score can track the course of a change; a transcript can show how it takes shape in words and in the relationship. Single cases, qualitative analyses, naturalistic studies and controlled studies answer different questions. Each method opens its own field of observation.
Subjectivity enters the method
Doing research is also an experience. The material involves the person reading it and can change their ideas during analysis. Keeping track of these shifts helps identify the researcher’s place in the findings. Subjectivity is not hidden: it enters the method.
Data and their limits
Every instrument brings something into the foreground. A study needs to state what it has chosen to observe and the understanding of the person and of health behind that choice. It also needs to identify the change it seeks and what remains less explored. Only then can data retain their value without claiming to say more than they can.
Patterns and the cases that do not fit
Similarities across several courses of therapy allow hypotheses to be formed. Cases that take a different direction are more than noise: they can reveal the limits of an explanation or the influence of context. Differences make visible what distinguishes each course of therapy and can give rise to new questions.
A tradition that can change
Research into Gestalt makes practice observable and describable. It also allows comparison with other approaches, to understand where dialogue is possible and where important differences remain. This exchange can change the way Gestalt understands and describes its own work.
DRA · Dialogical Recursive Approach
The whole enters the analysis.
The DRA grows out of the meeting of phenomenology and complexity. It treats the material as something with which the researcher enters into a relationship. Even before it is divided into codes, the whole text has an effect and conveys information of its own, often different in kind from what emerges from the individual parts.
As with analogue and digital communication, the two readings do not necessarily have to say the same thing. The method keeps both within the analysis. Several researchers work with the same material and compare their accounts. Subjectivity does not disappear: it enters the analysis and becomes open to discussion.
What experience takes shape?
Meaning · intention · atmosphere · metaphor
What happens in the passages?
Codes · categories · relationships · differences
Encountering the whole text
Each researcher reads all the material and writes a phenomenological account of the experience it evokes.
Approaching the parts
The group returns to the passages, proposes codes and develops categories while keeping its choices visible.
Bringing perspectives back into dialogue
The whole and the parts may converge, diverge or reveal areas that have remained in shadow. Differences are preserved and become new questions.
Read the Italian adaptation of the DRA Read the research article
At present
Current research.
I am currently head of research at Istituto Gestalt Firenze and, together with the Italian Federation of Gestalt Schools and Institutes (FISIG), coordinate research in Gestalt psychotherapy.
Patients, therapists, students, trainers and supervisors take part in different projects. For each one, we design a way of collecting material that fits the question, using qualitative and quantitative tools.
FISIG research
Psychotherapy, supervision and teaching.
The first two strands observe clinical work on different scales. Research into the therapeutic process follows what happens session by session; research into the course of therapy observes how a person’s relationship with themselves and their world changes across therapy as a whole. The other two strands concern supervision and teaching.
The therapeutic process
After each session, the patient and therapist complete a HAT (Helpful Aspects of Therapy) questionnaire. The patient responds from their own experience; the therapist tries to respond by imagining the patient’s position. Immediately afterwards, the therapist also records what they felt, thought and did during the encounter.
The responses record what each person recognised as helpful, significant or hindering. For each session, the comparison shows whether patient and therapist attach importance to the same moments and how they experience them.
We are also interested in the way an intervention finds its place in a session. Technique intertwines with the therapist’s presence and with the relationship they are experiencing with that person at that moment.
The course of therapy
The research follows people over time. Every four sessions, a standardised measure is accompanied by open questions about the body, emotions, relationships and episodes the person recognises as significant.
Measurements taken before and after show a trajectory. Open questions follow how change happened and what shifted. They also make it possible to see its effects in relationships and what the person begins to imagine again.
The remission of a symptom is one of the changes observed. Following the course of therapy allows other changes to emerge and shows how they unfold over time.
Supervision
The initial request and the subsequent accounts of the supervisor and supervisee are brought into dialogue. We follow how the case is presented and what becomes significant during the encounter. We are then interested in what changes when the therapist returns to work with the person.
Supervision can make visible the moments in a session that seem to have become stuck, as well as the personal difficulties the therapist encounters in clinical work. The research follows what happens as these come into focus and the effect supervision has when the therapist returns to the session.
Teaching
At the end of training modules, we collect students’ accounts of their experience, distinguishing what happens in theoretical learning from what takes shape in exercises, bodywork and group experiences.
The trainer attends to the conditions for learning but cannot learn on the student’s behalf. Comparing modules and institutes allows us to observe what supports the move from knowledge to practice and how each student begins to make it their own.
IGF research
Autobiographies, groups and theatre.
Autobiographies allow us to study how character runs through a life story. In the other two projects, attention turns to experiences that take place in groups and develop from one meeting to the next.
Autobiography and the Enneagram
The project extends the work published in Phenomena Journal to a wider range of life stories. In autobiographies, we look at how relational vectors, forms of love and character functions described by the Enneagram emerge, without treating the declared Enneagram type as a ready-made answer.
Each text is read from two perspectives. The phenomenological and existential analysis follows the lived experience and the overall meaning of the account; the computational analysis examines patterns and connections in the language. The findings and the declared Enneagram type are compared only afterwards. Agreements may indicate a pattern. Divergences show what each reading makes visible and what it leaves out. Here, a principle also found in the DRA returns: relating different readings without forcing them to coincide.
Group psychotherapy
We follow therapy groups over time, collecting the experiences of participants and the facilitator. Accounts of individual sessions are accompanied by meetings in which the group can give shared form to what is happening.
Change may concern one person and, at the same time, the way the group is together. The research seeks to retain both scales, observing how individual voices contribute to the group’s story and how that story in turn involves each person.
Theatre and personal growth
We study what happens when theatre becomes an experience of personal growth within a group. After each meeting, we collect the perspectives of participants and the facilitator to observe how what each person recognises as significant changes.
Theatre work makes it possible to explore different ways of relating, involving the whole person. Words intertwine with movement, looks and gestures. The research observes the effects of these experiences within the group and in life beyond the theatre.
Origins
From small groups to psychotherapy
My research began with small groups. During my Ph.D. at the University of Florence, I took part in the European Recognition project and built mathematical models to follow how opinions and decisions changed through interactions.
Moving into psychotherapy changed both the material and the questions. What remained was the attention to processes and to the reciprocal effects between parts. Even when a model works, it shows only part of a phenomenon and is not the same as what it describes.