University of Exeter Press
Joint Construction of Narratives in the Psychoanalytic Setting
The Role of Shifting Perspective
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Self-narratives of the client serve as a starting point in verbally oriented psychotherapies. Therapeutic work involves the reconstruction of the clients’ self-narratives, with both client and therapist taking an active role: the therapist helping to elaborate and transform various aspects of the client’s story by asking questions and offering interpretations etc. The therapist’s involvement in constructing the client’s self-narratives results in what is considered a joint construction of narratives. This book shows how such narrative interaction contributes to psychotherapy process by analyzing perspective shifts of speakers during the joint construction of narratives, using a novel discourse-based model of narrative perspective. Gathering empirical data from psychoanalytic psychotherapy over a number of years, the book also examines the analyst’s role in transforming narratives by facilitating the client’s perspective shifts.
Joint Construction of Narratives in the Psychoanalytic Setting will be of benefit to scholars of narrative discourse, clinical practitioners, and to students of both narrative and psychotherapy.
This original accomplishment demonstrates how patients and psychoanalysts collaboratively use the shifting of narrative perspectives to achieve a deeper understanding of patients' experiences. Eszter Berán and Zsolt Unoka's detailed linguistic analyses of rich sequences of therapy discourse elucidate mechanisms of healing of which both therapists and patients are unaware.
Prof. Dr. Tilmann Habermas, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin
Introduction Eszter Berán
Part 1 Theoretical background of the joint construction of narratives
1. Narrative interaction and its development Eszter Berán
2. Psychotherapeutic discourse Eszter Berán
3. A discourse-based model of narrative perspective Eszter Berán
Part 2 Methodology
4. The Budapest Psychotherapy Database Eszter Berán
Part 3 Empirical study of the joint construction of narratives in psychoanalysis
5. Autobiographical memory and narrative perspective Zsolt Unoka
6. Introducing a pseudo-narrator Eszter Berán
7. Long-term changes in interpersonal relating Eszter Berán and Zsolt Unoka
8. Long-term changes in expressing agency Eszter Berán and Zsolt Unoka
9. Working in the here and now of the therapeutic session Eszter Berán and Zsolt Unoka
Conclusion Zsolt Unoka and Eszter Berán
References and Bibliography
Index
