Self-Concept, Schematic Processing and Change in Perceptual-Processing Experiential Therapy

Abstract

The purpose of the present research was to determine the degree of relationship between pre-treatment to post-treatment changes in clients' self-schemata and level of self-concept, and to explore, both quantitatively and descriptively, the processes involved in the development of self-schemata in the context of the perceptual-processing method of experiential therapy (Toukmanian, 1990).

The study was constructed in two parts. Part I focused on the examination of change in self-concept and self-schemata, from the standpoint of clients' in-therapy process and final outcome. As was hypothesized, participants who received perceptual-processing experiential therapy improved on measures of self-concept and self-schemata to a significantly greater degree than participants who received skills training. Correspondingly, clients with the greatest in-therapy gains in perceptual-processing tended to have greater pre-treatment to post-treatment gains on the measures of self-concept and perceptual congruence. These results provided tentative support for the conception of change specified by the perceptual-processing therapeutic approach (Toukmanian, 1992) that self-schemata become more elaborate and flexible as a result of therapy, and that clients who engage in more complex processing operations are more likely to show improvement in self-concept and increased flexibility of self-schemata.

In Part II, a descriptive analysis was conducted on one client's experience of a segment of therapy that was identified by her as therapeutically significant, in light of Toukmanian's (1992) model of therapy. The results of this analysis provided support for the proposed model. First, the event that the client described as most meaningful to her was found to be the same segment of therapy that had been described as high processing in terms of Toukmanian's model of perceptual-processing (1992). Secondly, the client was able to identify elements of her in-therapy experience that were conceptually relevant to the taxonomy proposed by the model.