Maintenance and transformation of problematic self-narratives: a semiotic-dialogical approach

Abstract

This study focus on how the emergence of novelties in psychotherapy, which we term Innovative Moments (IMs), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. Novelty’s emergence challenge a person’s dominant self-narrative (i.e., usual way of understanding and experiencing), generating uncertainty. Frequently, clients resolve the uncertainty, by attenuating the novelty’s meaning, making a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organize clients’ self-narrative) and a non-dominant (or innovative) voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation – mutual in-feeding – throughout the therapeutic process, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and nondominant voices evolve from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes, using the microgenetic method from a semiotic autoregulatory perspective of the dialogical self: (1) Escalation of the innovative voice(s) and thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) Dominant and innovative voices negotiate and engage in joint action.