While content analysis of discourse has a rich history, relatively little research has been aimed at identrfying topics by their content. In this paper we test the assumption that identrfying the content and sequences of topics reveals clinically useful information about a person's mental structure, by studying change in the discourse structure over the course of a single therapy and by demonstrating the relevance the discourse structure and content have for the case. A new method is presented for idiographically identrfying topics of discourse by content and applied to the entire therapy of a single case of prolonged and severe bereavement. Through sequential analysis of the structure of patient discourse, sequential patterns of associated topics were revealed that converged with clinical case formulations and with clinicians' and patient's ratings of the importance of the identified topics to the case. Patterns of changing associations among topics from the first to the second half of therapy are interpreted as indicating an increased flexibility in the accessibility of clinically relevant topics.When a patient discusses a topic in therapy we expect the expressed content to indicate important aspects of how a patient thinks about ideas and felt emotions. Manifest in these communications is a patient's current state of organizing knowledge. In pathological states the organization of knowledge structures can include contradictory contents (Strauman & Higgins, 1988) as well as rigidly repeating, rather than flexible, ideational sequences (Horowitz, 1988;Segal, 1988). Important aspects of knowledge organization-healthy or pathological-can be examined by studying the patterns of associations among presented topics. This paper describes research which identifies topic content in the psy-
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