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Maintenance and Transformation of Problematic Self-Narratives: A Semiotic-Dialogical Approach

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Abstract

This study focuses on how the emergence of innovative moments (IMs), which are exceptions to a person’s dominant self-narrative (i.e., his or her usual way of understanding and experiencing), progresses to the construction of a new self-narrative. IMs challenge a person’s current framework of understanding and experiencing, generating uncertainty. When uncertainty is excessively threatening, a semiotic strategy to deal with it often emerges: attenuation of novelty’s meanings and implications by a quick return to the dominant self-narrative. From a dialogical perspective, a dominant voice (which organizes one’s current self-narrative) and a non-dominant or innovative voice (expressed during IMs) establish a cyclical relation, mutual in-feeding, blocking self-development. In this article, we analyze a successful psychotherapeutic case focusing on how the relation between dominant and non-dominant voices evolves from mutual in-feeding to other forms of dialogical relation. We have identified two processes: (1) escalation of the innovative voice(s) thereby inhibiting the dominant voice and (2) dominant and innovative voices negotiating and engaging in joint action.

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Notes

  1. Previous research has consistently shown that IMs can be reliably identified by use of the Innovative Moments Coding System (IMCS; Gonçalves et al. 2010a, b), and that they occur in psychotherapeutic change in different models of brief therapy (Gonçalves et al. 2010c). Furthermore, research suggests that there are five different categories of IMs which correspond to different narrative processes: action, reflection, protest, reconceptualization and performing change. From these studies our research team developed a heuristic model of change (see Gonçalves et al. 2010c).

  2. Microgenetic analysis is a method for studying how change develops in a certain period of time in a given individual. It involves intensive analysis of the transformation mechanisms and it has been widely applied in developmental studies of children (Flynn et al. 2007; Siegler and Crowley 1991).

  3. The Outcome Questionnaire (OQ) is a brief self-report instrument, composed of 45 items, designed for repeated measurement of client status through the course of therapy and at termination. It monitors the client’s progress in three dimensions: subjective discomfort, interpersonal relationships and social role functioning. A Portuguese version was developed by Machado, Machado and Klein (2006). The internal consistency values for the OQ-45 Total and respective subscales were in satisfactory ranges (0.69 to 0.92).

  4. According to Senra and Ribeiro (2009), “Implicative dilemmas represent a form of blockage in the individual’s constructing activity, where an undesired construction is strongly related to other, positive and self-defining, construction(s). As a result, the person can’t move towards a desired construction as that would imply abandoning some nuclear features of the self, or embracing some undesired aspects that correlate with the wanted one” (p.1). Senra et al. (2007; see also Fernandes 2007) developed a brief therapy aimed at solving these impasses in the clients’ constructions organized in five stages: (1) assessment, (2) reframing the problem as a dilemma, (3) dilemma elaboration, (4) alternative enactment and (5) treatment termination. Sessions are structured in terms of goals and tasks, but there is time flexibility for their completion. Their proposal adopts a hermeneutic and phenomenological perspective, using predominantly explorative interventions, privileging reflection and elaboration of the client’s personal meanings.

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Acknowledgments

This article was supported by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology Grants PTDC/PSI/72846/2006 (Narrative Processes in Psychotherapy, 2007_2010) and PhD Grants SFRH/BD/46189/2008 and SFRH/BD/48266/2008. We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of Jaan Valsiner, who critiqued earlier drafts of this article and assisted in the development of the concepts present herein, and extend our thanks to Eugénia Ribeiro and Joana Senra for allowing us to analyze the videos of Caroline’s case.

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  1. School of Psychology, University of Minho, 4710, Braga, Portugal

    António P. Ribeiro & Miguel M. Gonçalves

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  1. António P. Ribeiro
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  2. Miguel M. Gonçalves
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Correspondence to Miguel M. Gonçalves.

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Ribeiro, A.P., Gonçalves, M.M. Maintenance and Transformation of Problematic Self-Narratives: A Semiotic-Dialogical Approach. Integr. psych. behav. 45, 281–303 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-010-9149-0

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