Towards dialogues with and within silence in psychotherapy processes: Why the person of the therapist and the client matters?

Abstract

A clinical practice, when seen as a cultural setting, acts as a social regulator of both talk and silence. Taking the paper of Martínez et al. as a starting point, I suggest an integrative understanding of the psychotherapeutic process as a discursive genre highlighting the possible implications that the focus on silence can have in the dynamics of different I-positions. Furthermore, I hypothesize that generalization in psychotherapy research from the perspective of Semiotic Cultural Psychology and Dialogical Self Theory is to contemplate the tension between the uniqueness and sameness of specific: (a) psychotherapeutic approaches; (b) emotional tonalities of both therapist and client; (c) trajectories of the psychotherapeutic process; and (d) understandings of dialogue, meeting/encounter, and awareness.