A postmodern metaphor: Psychotherapy as rhetoric

Abstract

What is the non-objective/non-empirical nature of the psychotherapeutic discourse that heals? In general, to what extent must non-objective and non-empirical strategies be used in psychotherapeutic dialogues? In particular, to what extent must rhetoric be used to alleviate the symptoms of depression and anxiety? We shall examine the various rhetorical strategies in psychotherapy, and question the nature of the therapist–patient relation that pervades psychotherapeutic discourse.

Notes

See Jerome D. Frank & Julia B. Frank, Persuasion & Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy, 3rd edn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

S. Glaser, “Rhetoric and Therapy,” in Psychotherapy Process: Current Issues and Future Directions, ed. M. J. Mahoney (New York: Plenum Press, 1980), 313–34.

Frank and Frank, Persuasion & Healing, 300.

See Daniel C. Dennett, “The Origins of Selves,” in Metaphysics: Classical and Contemporary Readings, ed. R. C. Hoy and L. N. Oaklander (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1991), 355–64.

See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage Books, 1988); and Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970).

See James H. Olthuis, The Beautiful Risk: A New Psychology of Loving and Being Loved (Michigan: Zondervan, 2001).

Ibid., 37.

Frank and Frank, Persuasion & Healing, 178.

See Roy Schafer, “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 25–49. See also Roy Schafer, Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Roy Schafer, “Authority, Evidence, and Knowledge in the Psychoanalytic Relationship,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 65 (1996): 236–53.

See Frank and Frank, Persuasion & Healing.

See Schafer, “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue;” Schafer, Retelling a Life; Schafer, “Authority, Evidence, and Knowledge in the Psychoanalytic Relationship.”

Paul Fairfield, “Truth Without Methodologism: Gadamer and James,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67 (1993): 285–97.

See Tanya DiTommaso, “Contradiction and Confirmation: Validity as Persuasiveness,” Symposium 6 (2002): 23–35.

Frank and Frank, Persuasion & Healing, 132–9, 155, 176.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 121.

Ibid., 95.

Jacques Derrida, “What is a ‘Relevant' Translation?” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001): 174–200.

“An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” The Literary Review 14 (1980): 21.

In his latest writings, Hans-Georg Gadamer also made a significant point of emphasizing the rhetorical underpinnings of all that we take to be true in the natural and social sciences. See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: Hans-Georg Gadamer in Conversation with Riccardo Dottori, trans. Rod Coltman and Sigrid Koepke (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003).

Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, 120.

S. Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), 289.

Frank and Frank, Persuasion & Healing, 184.

Ibid., 180.

Ibid., 300.