Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Re-Searching Psychotherapy as a Social Practice
- 2 Theorizing Persons in Structures of Social Practice
- 3 A Study – Its Design and Conduct
- 4 Clients' Ordinary Lives Plus Sessions
- 5 Therapy in Clients' Social Practice across Places
- 6 Changes in Clients' Practice across Places
- 7 Changing Problems across Places
- 8 The Conduct of Everyday Life and the Life Trajectory
- 9 The Children's Changing Conducts of Everyday Life and Life Trajectories
- 10 The Parents' Changing Conducts of Everyday Life and Life Trajectories
- 11 The Changing Conduct of Everyday Family Life and Family Trajectory
- 12 Research in Social Practice
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Re-Searching Psychotherapy as a Social Practice
- 2 Theorizing Persons in Structures of Social Practice
- 3 A Study – Its Design and Conduct
- 4 Clients' Ordinary Lives Plus Sessions
- 5 Therapy in Clients' Social Practice across Places
- 6 Changes in Clients' Practice across Places
- 7 Changing Problems across Places
- 8 The Conduct of Everyday Life and the Life Trajectory
- 9 The Children's Changing Conducts of Everyday Life and Life Trajectories
- 10 The Parents' Changing Conducts of Everyday Life and Life Trajectories
- 11 The Changing Conduct of Everyday Family Life and Family Trajectory
- 12 Research in Social Practice
- References
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives
Summary
This book is about psychotherapy. But it does not share the perspective normally adopted in the specialist research literature in clinical psychology. Instead, it sheds light on therapy from a perspective that plays a minor role in that literature. Rather than looking at therapist interventions in sessions, I look at the key role of the clients' experiences and activities in bringing about the outcomes of their therapy. What is more, since therapy is meant to work on the clients' troubles in their everyday lives outside sessions, I study the interplay between sessions and the clients' ongoing everyday lives between and after sessions in other places. I did so by following what goes on in the therapy sessions as well as in other social contexts of clients' ordinary lives outside sessions throughout a small number of family therapy cases. Indeed, in order to reach a more complete understanding of the workings of therapy, we need materials that cover what goes on in sessions as well as in other contexts of the clients' lives.
But the book is even more about persons in social practice. I use therapy as a case in point to study clients as persons changing in their ongoing everyday lives, among other things, in response to the deliberate change efforts of their therapy. However, as soon as we stop believing that personal change in relation to therapy occurs only within sessions, we need a theory that takes appropriate account of the fact that persons change and learn in the course of moving through a set of diverse social contexts: their sessions, home, school, workplace, and so forth.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Psychotherapy in Everyday Life , pp. 1 - 2Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007