An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the haptic and verbal experiences at the Clay Field Therapy: A longitudinal qualitative study with the research group of medically unexplained symptoms

Clay Field Therapy is a sensorimotor art psychotherapy that focuses on haptic perception and how hands relate to the materials rather than what they do with them. There has been small number of systematic research on the Clay Field Therapy while it has been practiced effectively for a long time, especially in Europe and Australia. The study presented here seems to be first qualitative research that examines how touch and speech are experienced in a psychotherapy process and how the participant's lifeworld is influenced by these two phenomena. This study can also be the first phenomenological investigation of the Clay Field Therapy. It employs Longitudinal Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in order to engage in a deeper examination of the dynamic interplay between haptic and verbal experiences at the Clay Field and to explore how the participants attempt to make sense of the therapeutic process. The research participants are 25- 45 years old, five Clay Field Therapy clients who are suffering from Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS). Data collection was designed in the form of a semi-structured, one-to-one, in-depth interview, which conducted right after the participants' first and twelfth Clay Field Therapy sessions. The manuscripts made of the interviews' voice records and were served as the raw data for the study. Five superordinate themes emerged from the eight-staged longitudinal phenomenological analysis of the transcripts. The superordinate themes represents five interrelated dimensions of changes across time and the subordinate themes presents the milestones of them. The findings were demonstrated by multiple quotes from the participants and, discussed by engaging in a dialog with clinical psychology and phenomenological philosophy. This research presents a detailed illustration of the Clay Field Therapy process that the haptic experiments allows the participants to connect with the non- verbal or preverbal psychological content, and the discover of the possibilities of hands at the Clay Field can turn into the appearance anew possibilities of the words. The findings suggest that the distinction between the verbal and haptic expression gradually became complementary for each other, so the participants created an authentic language that allows them to unfold the meaning of their lifeworld and, to make their own detailed explanations of the symptoms they lived. The longitudinal phenomenological analysis of the changes in the spanning time also shows that the participants live significantly less MUS in their everyday life.