IPU Graduate Florian Dreyer Wins an Award for his Dissertation

Dr. Florian Dreyer has received the Hermann Paul Award 2022 for his dissertation in which he combines psychotherapy research with conversation research. Every year, the Hermann Paul School of Linguistics at the Universities of Freiburg and Basel announce the award for the “best dissertation this past year from the field of linguistics”. Florian Dreyer is an IPU graduate as well as a part of the IPU-affiliated JUNKTIM e.V. institute. His work was supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Pfänder from the Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg and by Prof. Dr. Michael B. Buchenholz from the IPU. The IPU congratulates Florian Dreyer on this award, which also represents a special contribution to psychotherapy research and the interdisciplinary integration of psychoanalytic research.

In his work, Dreyer examined two processes of psychotherapy using two tools of conversation analysis. He was able to demonstrate how phrases once recognized as helpful are repeatedly used by patients and therapists to resolve distinct interactional difficulties. The psychotherapies examined took place over several year which allowed Dreyer to not only determine the individual use of language but also the participants’ changes in the use of language (linguistics change). Through the longitudinal observation, it became clear how so-called mental models, i.e., contexts illustrated by metaphors, are used in psychotherapeutic interactions. The shared reference to these models represents a central relational experience that had a key impact in the psychotherapies examined.