Research Catalog

Title

In the therapist's mirror : reality in the making / Marilyn Wedge.

Author

Wedge, Marilyn

Publication

New York : Norton, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 172 p.; 22 cm.

Summary

• This book integrates the problem-solving focus of strategic family therapy with narrative therapy's emphasis on stories and the cultural context of meaning. It extends the rich and productive tradition of strategic therapy by embracing the importance of symbolic forms in creating and transforming experience. Marilyn Wedge uses engaging case examples to illustrate her central argument, that all experience, even the experience of one's own self, is a construction of signs. Drawing upon the power of symbolic forms to create meaning, she introduces a new theoretical position of semiotic constructivism. While symbols have long been a part of psychotherapy, the roles of such symbolic forms as myth, ritual, and polysemic or multivocal language in constructing meaning in therapy need to be reinterpreted in light of the postmodern era. This integration of strategic and narrative in the symbolic is laid out in the first half of the book.
• In the therapist's mirror the symbol becomes a structuring metaphor. It is the place where the therapist and client meet, where the jumble of life becomes meaningful, and where a strategic move has power. Here reality is made, and transformed, in the experience of our lives.

Subject

• Personal Construct Theory
• Family Therapy
• Psychotherapy
• Family psychotherapy > Case studies
• Psychoanalysis > Semiotics
• Personal construct therapy
• Constructivism (Psychology)

Genre/Form

• Case Reports
• Case studies

Note

• "A Norton professional book."

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Ch. 1. A Reflected Reality -- Ch. 2. The Mirror of Signs -- Ch. 3. The Semiotic Self -- Ch. 4. Constructing Family Values: Therapy and Fiction -- Ch. 5. Reflexivity, Paradox, and Myth -- Ch. 6. Reciprocal Sequences: The String Eater -- Ch. 7. Repentance and Reparation in a Case of Sexual Abuse -- Ch. 8. The Hub of the Wheel: Therapy as a Rite of Passage -- Ch. 9. Children's School Problems.

ISBN

0393702359

LCCN

^^^96008687^

OCLC

• 34742222
• SCSB-11988589

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library