Summary

What is going on in a therapeutic setting when one person tells a story to another? Is it really as it appears to be, with the story being told in order to communicate some information, either affective or factual? Or is this way of thinking about the business of therapy limiting, both for the people concerned (therapist and patient) and for those who theorise about the therapeutic process?

These are the questions around which this work is organised. The thesis itself takes the form of a story being told, the story of a therapist (Steve), of his client (Joseph) and his clinical supervisor (Giles).

The author uses the story of these relationships (Joseph and Steve, Steve and Giles) to argue that stories are told more to create something (a relationship) and forge something (a more vital connection to an animating world) than to communicate something. The author suggests that an aspect of the Freudian legacy is a largely unconscious but powerful assumption in the minds of therapists that they are in the business of 'unlocking riddles', of intellectually grasping the underlying meaning of their patients' communications. He gives an account of his own struggle with this underlying assumption and how it limited his effectiveness.

The author draws on both a philosophical tradition (represented in particular by Spinoza and Nietzsche) and a psychoanalytic tradition (Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Milner, Alvarez, Zinkin, Stern, Clark, Hillman and Eigen) to show what he suggests are more vital ways of thinking about human behaviour in general and the therapeutic encounter in particular.