Methods of Self‐Confrontation in Family Therapy

Abstract

The research, clinical applications, and effects of audiotape and videotape self‐confrontation techniques to family therapy are reviewed. A variety of new applications, such as cross‐confrontation and interpersonal process recall, are integrated into the practice of family therapy. Thirteen specific audiovisual self‐confrontation methods are reviewed along with reported positive and negative effects of their use. As most novel additions to a therapists “bag of tricks”, self‐confrontation methods are being abused, applied randomly and unsystematically. There is an urgent need for well‐designed and relevant research in the area.

Self-confrontation interview with suicide attempters

“…The primary interest of this procedure lies in the changes of the client. Many other authors were also mainly interested in changes induced by the selfconfrontation in psychotherapy (Daitzman, 1977;Grube et al, 1994;Ronge and Self-confrontation interview 5 Kuegelgen, 1993;Sanborn et al, 1975;Schwartz and Inbar-Saban, 1988;Vandereycken et al, 1992). They shared this orientation with many others using video playback for similar purposes (Andrew, 1993;Dowrick, 1991;Fuller and Manning, 1973).…”

“…They reported that a group undertaking self-confrontation showed signi cant differences between pre-and post videotape playback scores indicating greater congruency between self-as-seen-by-self and self-as-seen-by-others. An early review of the reported positive and negative effects of the use of 13 speci c audio-visual self-confrontation methods can be found in Daitzman (1977). Dowrick (1991) underlined the necessity to distinguish between the self-correction and the motivating effect of video self-confrontation.…”