The Relational Mind in Couple Therapy: A Bateson-Inspired View of Human Life as an Embodied Stream

Research on human intersubjectivity has found that humans participate in a dialogue throughout their life, and that this is manifested not only via language, but also nonverbally, with the entire body. Such an understanding of human life has brought into focus some basic systemic ideas concerning the human relational mind. For Gregory Bateson, the mind works as a system, formed from components that are in continuous interaction with each other. In our Relational Mind research project, we followed twelve couple therapy processes involving two therapists per session, looking at the ways in which the four participants attuned to each other with their bodies, including their autonomic nervous system activity. Using observations from the project, we here describe the ways through which the relational and embodied mind can be realized in a couple therapy setting.

An Auto-Ethnographic Study of "Open Dialogue": The Illumination of Snow

This auto-ethnographic study describes the changes in the author's thinking and clinical work connected to her first-hand experience of Open Dialogue, which is an innovative, psychosocial approach to severe psychiatric crises developed in Tornio, Finland. In charting this trajectory, there is an emphasis on three interrelated themes: the micropolitics of U.S. managed mental health care; the practice of "dialogicality" in Open Dialogue; and the historical, cultural, and scientific shifts that are encouraging the adaptation of Open Dialogue in the United States. The work of Gregory Bateson provides a conceptual framework that makes sense of the author's experience and the larger trends. The study portrays and underscores how family and network practices are essential to responding to psychiatric crises and should not be abandoned in favor of a reductionist, biomedical model.

The Embodied Attunement of Therapists and a Couple within Dialogical Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Relational Mind Research Project

In dialogical practice, therapists seek to respond to the utterances of clients by including in their own response what the client said. No research so far exists on how, in dialogs, therapists and clients attune themselves to each other with their entire bodies. The research program The Relational Mind is the first to look at dialog in terms of both the outer and the inner dialogs of participants (clients and therapists), observed in parallel with autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements. In the ANS, the response occurs immediately, even before conscious thought, making it possible to follow how participants in a multiactor dialog synchronize their reactions and attune themselves to each other. The couple therapy case presented in this article demonstrates how attunement is often not a simple "all at the same time" phenomenon, but rather a complex, dyadic or triadic phenomenon which changes over time. In the case presented, there was strong synchrony between one therapist and one client in terms of their arousal level throughout the therapy session. It was also observed that high stress could occur when someone else was talking about something related to the participant, or if that person mirrored the participant's words. Overall, it seems that in evaluating the rhythmic attunement between therapists and clients it is not enough to look at single variables; instead, integrated information from several channels is needed when one is seeking to make sense of the embodiment.