A developmental perspective on psychotherapy process, psychotherapists' expertise, and “Meaning-Making Conflict” within therapeutic relationships: Part II

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Part I—A Dialectical-Constructivist View of Human Development, Psychotherapy, and the Dynamics of Meaning-Making Conflict Within Therapeutic Relationships-reviewed a dialectical-constructivist model of human development and articulated, in the language of that model, how psychotherapy, in general, works. It described and illustrated three generic processes which contribute to the frequent successes of an extremely diverse range of psychotherapy theories and practices. This view of psychotherapy focused on both the client's meaning-making processes and the therapist's meaning-making processes, and how they contribute together to effective psychotherapy. Part I also offered a way of understanding what is going on when therapeutic progress is blocked by conflict between the client's and the therapist's meaning-making processes. Part II—Dialectical, Thinking and Psychotherapeutic Expertise: Implications for Training Psychotherapists and Protecting Clients from ‘Theoretical Abuse’—explores those experiences in which the therapist's exercise of this or her own meaning-making structures, and maintenance of the integrity of his or her theories, has a limiting or destructive impact on the value of therapy to the client. It considers the concept of “theoretical abuse” by psychotherapists as a way of characterizing the most destructive of these experiences. This serves as a rhetorical device for introducing comparisons between these phenomena and the phenomena of sexual abuse by psychotherapists, in terms of dynamics, prevalence, and appropriate strategies for prevention. Part II uses work on the development of dialectical thinking in adulthood to conceptualize how different understandings of the nature of psychotherapists' theories and expertise increase or decrease the likelihood and severity of ‘theoretical abuse’. Finally, it derives implications for training psychologists and other psychotherapy professionals.