Toward a multimodal communication theory of psychotherapy: the vicarious coprocessing of experience

"Talking" therapy is examined as an interpersonal transaction. The personal-experience narrative is used as a vehicle through which the patient and therapist coprocess a mutual experience. Within the narrative transaction, the patient is able to vicariously re-experience and reconfigure the narrated events as he/she believes the therapist is experiencing them. Nonverbal symbolic modes of communication such as music, movement, and art also provide media through which patients and therapists can coprocess a mutual experience. The vicarious coprocessing of experience is a therapeutic factor common to talking therapy, music therapy, art therapy, movement therapy, conventional social interaction, and some healing practices in other cultures.