In this book, Dreier shows how clients make therapy work in their everyday lives. Therapy cannot fulfill its purpose until the clients can make it work outside the therapy room in relation to the concerns, people, and places of their everyday lives. Research on therapy has largely ignored these efforts. Based on session transcripts and interviews with a family of four about their everyday lives, Dreier shows the extensive and varied work the clients do to make their therapy work across places. Processes of change and learning are seen in a new perspective and it is shown that expert practices depend on how persons conduct their everyday lives. To grasp this, Dreier developed a theory of persons that is based on how they conduct their lives in social practice. This theory is grounded in critical psychology and social practice theory and is also relevant for understanding other expert practices such as education.

The main purpose of this paper is to present a theory of persons that is rooted in the way persons conduct their everyday lives. The approach and the key concepts in the theory are presented in the second, central part of the paper. This theoretical approach to personhood is unusual. Current research on personality recognizes that personality must be studied in the interplay between personsituation-behavior. In the first part of the paper I present some of the core issues in those studies. The theoretical approach aims at resolving these issues. These issues are one of the two major sources of inspiration for the theoretical approach. The other important source of inspiration are studies of psychological interventions. In the third part of the paper I present a study that illuminates how the theory may provoke and enrich our understanding of interventions.

In this article I argue for grounding psychological theories of persons in relation to structures of social practice. I introduce crucial features of such a theory of persons which is based on critical psychology and invite contributions to its further development. The theory emphasizes that persons are participants involved in personal trajectories in relation to structural arrangements of social practice. It is intended to lead to a richer and worldlier psychology. It also leads to a different understanding of professional psychological practices and of their users. To illuminate this, I present key insights from a study of clients attending therapy. Client changes do not occur only in therapeutic sessions but also in and across the contexts in which these clients live their lives in structures of social practice. In this respect, though, the structural arrangement of secluded sessions with intimate expert strangers significantly affects the mode of working of therapy in the social practice of its clients.

In discussion about basic theoretical approaches in a non-Cartesian psychology several candidates for a key concept were proposed, such as action, activity, relation, dialogue and discourse. None of these concepts, however, sufficiently grounds psychological theories of individual psychology in social practice. To accomplish this we need to conceptualize subjects as participants in structures of ongoing social practice. In this paper I argue why and address issues of subjectivity as encountered by persons in their participation in complex structures of social practice. I introduce the concept of personal conduct of life and life-trajectory as elaborations of my theory. And I discuss this theoretical approach and show what is at stake in developing it by comparing it to similar approaches in the current literature on the person, self, and identity.

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