Moment-to-Moment Guidance of Clinical Interventions by AEDP’s Healing-Oriented Transformational Phenomenology: Commentary on Vigoda Gonzalez’s (2018) Case of "Rosa"

Abstract

This paper, using the methodology of moment-to-moment microanalysis of videotape-based clinical transcripts, explores how Nicole Vigoda Gonzalez’s (2018) case study manifests AEDP’s fundamental transformational phenomenology in clinical action. Vigoda Gonzalez’s highly effective AEDP therapy of Rosa is informed by AEDP’s first "avatar" or iteration (prior to 2008), at the time, a three-state phenomenology. Yet, a close reading of the case reveals the very transformational phenomena, systematically and abundantly reflected in the author’s clinical data, that necessitated the theoretical and clinical developments of AEDP’s second avatar (post-2008) and the current four-state model of transformational change. It is a validation both of the soundness of this student therapist's clinical work and of the accuracy and power of AEDP’s healing-oriented transformational theory that constructs not in the author’s repertoire are nevertheless reflected and illustrated in the unfolding of Rosa’s treatment. This most interesting and unusual experience further illustrates how a descriptive phenomenology, guided by AEDP’s North Star, i.e., its orientation toward the wired-in healing within, can constitute an empirically sound alternative to the manualization of psychotherapeutic treatments. Also uncannily, this parallels the emphasis in Owen's (2013) multicultural orientation (MCO) framework on the need for "values" or "virtues," such as cultural humility, to "inform therapeutic activities as an alternative to the focus on multicultural competencies."