by Dr Eero Riikonen (Author), Mr Gregory Madan Smith (Author)
Re-imagining Therapy explores the benefits to therapeutic practice of paying attention to how people relate to and with language - how ways of talking support different kinds of relationships and experiences. The authors draw on social constructionist, dialogic, narrative and solution-oriented approaches to argue that `detachment' and `objectivity' have impoverished our ways of understanding life and language. They focus on words and language as tools, gestures and actions through which therapy can work to build a sense of promise and trust.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
Published: 14 Feb 1997
ISBN 10: 0803976542
ISBN 13: 9780803976542
`Written in a humorous and accessible form, the book focuses on how resources and language used by people in everyday life and conversation can also be harnessed for use in successful therapy... Riikonen and Madan Smith's book offers a refreshing and insightful addition to publications addressing [the] discursive turn in therapy... in a lively and accessible way, [it] maps outs a territory in which further to explore potentials for the therapeutic process. Most importantly, it serves to challenge some traditional ways of thinking and it encourages the reader to ask questions about the complicated relationship between language and mental states' - The European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health
`Opens a new and exciting vista for deliberation on the therapeutic process... The authors do not wish so much to describe optimal therapy as to demonstrate its potentials within the text itself' - Kenneth J Gergen and Sheila McNamee (from the Foreword)