[Experience-centred cognitive psychotherapy: towards a phenomenologically oriented therapy].

Post-rationalist cognitive psychotherapy (PRCP), developed by Vittorio Guidano, focuses on the relationship between subjective experience and reflective explanation. Although this is a powerful, innovative, and flexible treatment model, there are some aspects that deserve reflection and could be further developed. We propose a treatment model that integrates PRCP with some principles of phenomenology, i.e., experience has a meaning that precedes reflection; it is structured according to "manifestation rules" that connect feelings, thoughts, and actions; personal identity is grounded in the action and cannot be reduced to what remains identical throughout the life course. As in traditional PRCP, a key aspect of treatment is the examination of the interplay between experience and explanation. However, treatment focuses more on the understanding of experience than on its verbally mediated evaluation. Moreover, it aims not so much at revealing the rules through which the patient relates his experience to him/herself, as at bringing to light all the relevant aspects of the patient's experience, validating the experience by making explicit the links, enabling the patient to take hold of his/her experience, and leading him/her to learn how to understand it without the mediation of reflection. The knowledge of the tendencies, characteristic of each personal meaning organization, to find difficulties in grasping specific aspects of experience helps the therapist identify the sequences of experience that are not sufficiently articulated and understood. The main therapeutic procedures are identification, exploration, validation, and narrative reconfiguration of the experience that was not understood by the patient, in order to reduce the related feelings of strangeness and unfamiliarity, facilitate emotion regulation, and help the patient reflect and make choices in harmony with self-realization. Future research priorities include developing a treatment manual and testing the effectiveness of the proposed treatment model in a clinical trial.