JAKOB narrative analysis: The psychodynamic conflict as a narrative model

Abstract

When a patient tells a story during psychotherapy sessions, it is both a mutual interaction between patient and therapist and a presentation of personal experience. The patient calls up and re-creates a biographical occurrence and puts it before a listener for viewing, enacting it verbally in the perspective of wish fulfillment and anxiety coping. JAKOB narrative analysis, situated in the field of psychoanalytical and narrative analytical research, is an encoding-supported qualitative instrument for the systematic reconstruction of verbal everyday narratives in the context of psychotherapeutic processes. In this study, the JAKOB narrative analysis is described in detail with the aid of an example narrative, put in relation to the therapeutic process, and discussed critically from a methodological viewpoint.

Fantasized recipient–donor relationships following lung transplantations: A qualitative case analysis based on patient narratives

“…The depiction of the ego figure as empathic, considerate, and conscientious on the one hand, and as at the mercy of her feelings on the other, serves to promote her self‐acceptance. It also points out the wish for recognition by conscience (Boothe et al ., 2002, pp. 82ff.…”

“…The elaborately presented empathy of the ego figure for the situation of the donor family, as recounted by the narrator, is selfless only on the surface. It serves just as much to neutralize personal feelings of loss and solitude as to induce the wish for a perpetual child status , in which the parents unconditionally accept their eternally loved and welcome child (Boothe et al ., 2002, p. 87; 2010, p. 519). The word “alienated” (S 20) expresses how existentially the ego figure experiences the intervention by the authority figure, for whom the narrator has no understanding whatsoever.…”

“…Based on 20 semi‐structured patient interviews following lung transplantation, the following narrative analysis contributes to an understanding of how organ recipients overcome the partly physical and partly psychic abrogation of boundaries between themselves and their donors. A total of eight patient narratives were investigated using the JAKOB narrative analysis (Boothe et al ., 2002, 2010). This procedure allows for the qualitative analysis of narratives dealing with the relationship between organ recipient and donor from a psychodynamic perspective.…”

Dialectical behavior therapy skills training affects defense mechanisms in borderline personality disorder: An integrative approach of mechanisms in psychotherapy

“…Although all raters were blinded for the condition, blinding might have been uncovered in some cases by the content of the interviews. Moreover, there is a number of alternative approaches to investigate a patients' transcribed narrative to explore the linguistic expression of psychopathological mental processes (Boothe, Grimm, Hermann, & Luder, 2010;Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010). However, our interest focused on defenses, and the DMRS is a validated instrument to investigate verbatim transcripts according to a highly standardized…”

Linguistic measures of the referential process in psychodynamic treatment: The English and Italian versions

“…Qualitative programs, such as JAKOB (Boothe, Grimm, Hermann, & Luder, 2010) or the Automated Co-occurrence Analysis for Semantic Mapping (ACASM) (Salvatore, Gennaro, Auletta, Tonti, & Nitti, 2012), segment and code the text according to content, and also perform semantic analysis. In addition to Mergenthaler's TCM, described above, quantitative programs, such as the General Inquirer or the LIWC of Pennebaker and Francis (1996), generally use word lists called dictionaries with various categories of words, and then count the number of words in a text that match each dictionary, and report the proportion of such words in each text.…”