Showing papers by "João Salgado published in 2010"

Innovations in psychotherapy: Tracking the narrative construction of change.

Abstract: This chapter presents a research program on narrative change processes that is under development at our research center. It developed from the study of narrative therapy, following White and Epston’s (1990) model of re-authoring narratives, in which the notion of “unique outcome” is central. Unique outcomes are defined as all the details that fall outside the domain of the dominant narrative, namely, episodes in which the person did, thought, imagined or felt something different, or related to others in a new way, from what the problematic narrative “prescribes” for his or her life (see also White, 2007). We started studying how “unique outcomes” developed throughout the process of narrative therapy, and then wondered if developing these narrative details outside the main problematic story could be, in a sense, a common factor of all different kinds of psychotherapies, even if this is something that therapists outside the narrative tradition do not emphasize explicitly. If one assumes that all therapists wish to produce novelties in different forms (cognitive, affective, behavioral) it is not hard to

Commentary: Self-Narrative Reconstruction in Psychotherapy: Looking at Different Levels of Narrative Development

Abstract: This commentary focuses on Cross’s (2010, this issue) work as an opportunity to elaborate upon how to study narrative-dialogical processes from the perspective of complexity. We start by elaborating on the notion that narrative development is a multidimensional activity that extends through several organizational levels and on the limitations of conventional research methods for narrative analysis. Following this, we focus on our experience of research on narrative change in psychotherapy in order to exemplify this point. From our perspective, clients’ problematic self-narratives can be challenged by the emergence of innovative ways of thinking and behaving that the client narrates during the therapeutic conversation (innovative moments or i-moments). Our results suggest that the reconstruction of a person’s self-narrative depends on the structure of relations between i-moments, rather than on the mere accumulation of i-moments. Therefore, we are particularly interested in looking at how clusters of i-mom...