The Self as a Theater of Voices: Disorganization and Reorganization of a Position Repertoire

The theater metaphor provides therapist and client with an imaginative, dialogical procedure for the exploration and change of clients' self-narratives with a focus on both their spatial and temporal characteristics. The potentials of the theater metaphor for psychotherapy was illustrated with the case of a client with a monological self-narrative, in which one position was rigidly and persistently dominating her self-system as a whole. The therapeutic strategy was to construct counterpositions that were strong enough to function as viable counterforces moving the self from a monological to a dialogical construction. Finally, some therapeutic implications of the theater metaphor were discussed.

I thank Els Hermans-Jansen for giving me the opportunity to cooperate as a cotherapist with her.