Hermeneuties and psychotherapy
Gabriele Chiari, Maria Laura Nuzzo
Centro di Psicologia e Psicoterapia Costruttivista, Roma (Italy)
Abstract
Kelly's personal construct psychology centres about personal processes
rather than individual structures, and a relational, person-oriented rather
than individual-oriented or society-oriented, notion of role. Congruently,
personal construct psychotherapy stresses the importance of the cli-ent-therapist
relationship as the medium in which a re-activation of a personal movement
can be favored. These original elements could be and, more commonly, have
been developed in terms of a cognitive approach. As an alternative, our
paper aims at showing how the above mentioned fea-tures can be elaborated
according to a hermeneutic approach, and at suggesting how the whole psychotherapy
process can be regarded as a flow of conversational acts. While both the
client's and the therapist's acts are inextricably intertwined, the role
of the latter is based upon his/her at-tempts to construe the former within
both a personal (relational) domain and a professional meta-domain.
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