Maintenance and Transformation of Problematic Self-Narratives: A Semiotic-Dialogical Approach

Abstract

This study focuses on how the emergence of innovative moments (IMs), which are exceptions to a person's dominant self-narrative (i.e., his or her usual way of understanding and experiencing), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. IMs challenge a person's current framework of understanding and experiencing, generating uncertainty. When uncertainty is excessively threatening, a semiotic strategy to deal with it often emerges: attenuation of novelty's meanings and implications by a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organizes one's current self-narrative) and a non-dominant or innovative voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation, mutual in-feeding, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and non-dominant voices evolves from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes: (1) escalation of the innovative voice(s) thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) dominant and innovative voices negotiating and engaging in joint action.

Psychotherapy Research Needs Theory. Outline for an Epistemology of the Clinical Exchange

“…This is quite evident in Ribeiro and Gonçalves (2011), who interpret the content of the patient's narrative in terms of the signs' movement around and towards a point of quasi-steadiness-movements resulting from the inherent oppositional structure of meaning-for a discussion on the semiotic structure of the signs, see Freda (2011). Consistently with this view, Lyra (2011) highlights how the development of clinical sensemaking has to be seen in terms of balancing among opposite narrative trends-namely in terms of dynamic organization-rather than in terms of the mere increase in the incidence of clinically positive contents in the patient's narrative.…”

Positioning Microanalysis: Studying the Self Through the Exploration of Dialogical Processes

“…The following pattern appears as a hypothetical pattern of coherent or enabling mutual in-feeding (Valsiner, 2002; see also Freda, 2011;Lyra, 2011;Ribeiro & Gonçalves, 2011). I as depressed (with I as sad as a possible variation) ßà I as resentful.…”

The Building of Models as Pathway to Understand the Therapeutic Process

“…Both the work of Gonçalves (2011), andFaccio et al (2011) could be read from the viewpoint of such perspective-suggesting that framing psychotherapy research into a dialogical intersubjective model offers a new strategy that focuses on the therapeutic process. That is, aimed at developing a comprehensive model about clinical process intended as phenomenon to be modelled in its globality, rather than a mere view point in which analyze the contribution of discrete factors in producing change.…”

“…Following this suggestion, and commenting on Gonçalves (2011), andFaccio, Centomo andMininni (2011), I highlight the need to reframe the therapeutic change research in terms of a modelling approach. According to such perspective models arise through focusing on the general rule of the functioning of a change process within the local domain of a particular therapeutic encounter, making it possible both to manage it in line with the specific local aims, and to promote the deepening and the develop of scientific knowledge.…”