Maintenance and transformation of problematic self-narratives : a semiotic-dial...

• Author(s): Ribeiro, António P. ; Gonçalves, Miguel M.
• Date: 2010
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/12641
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Innovative moments; Dialogical self; Mutual In-feeding; Semiotic regulation
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

This study focus on how the emergence of novelties in psychotherapy, which we term Innovative Moments (IMs), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. Novelty’s emergence challenge a person’s dominant self-narrative (i.e., usual way of understanding and experiencing), generating uncertainty. Frequently, clients resolve the uncertainty, by attenuating the novelty’s meaning, making a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organize clients’ self-narrative) and a non-dominant (or innovative) voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation – mutual in-feeding – throughout the therapeutic process, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and nondominant voices evolve from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes, using the microgenetic method from a semiotic autoregulatory perspective of the dialogical self: (1) Escalation of the innovative voice(s) and thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) Dominant and innovative voices negotiate and engage in joint action.