Making Sense together (tid bits - edited for blog)

Organizing Principals of the Client

     Buirski and Haglund explain that a client has symptomatic behaviors that stems from how he,   has organized and made sense of his unique life experience, and how this is interpreted by him. The principles that organize experience are formed in the early relationships with caregivers (pp 31-32).   This provides the client with a template of how he has interpreted meaning of events in an understanding of himself and his relationship with others.  

The Inter-subjectivity Approach to Psychotherapy

The Inter-subjectivity approach is trying to relate in ways that are experienced by our clients as providing needed self object experiences.  This is accomplished by relating with our clients in ways that promote the recognition, articulation and integration of discrepant affect states.   By doing this we attend to features that contributed to this client’s particular organization of experience that have undermined the development of self cohesion (ibid, p 82).  The psychotherapy process unfolds through dialogue (ibid, p 104). Self awareness is a key, in that it alerts the therapist to her inevitable impact on the patient’s subjective experience.  Each person, and his story is unique, and the experience and meaning of the therapeutic work will unfold as a construction at the intersection of the two distinct subjectivities (ibid. p 105).   Change results from making sense together and making sense together includes the two subjective experiences of therapist and client, the unique field created by their mutual influence and the specific understanding of the patient’s subjective experience that emerges through their work (p 32).    

The New Formulation of the Clients Organizing Principles

     The psychotherapeutic task is to “illuminate” the underlying organizing principals from which the behavior is from, thus allowing for the transformation with a new understanding gained in a relationship with the therapist.  The inter-subjective perspective recognizes that these organizations of experience exert their influence while remaining largely unconscious (Ibid. p 124).

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[1] Buirski, Peter and Haglund, Pamela.  Making Sense Together The Intersubjective Approach To Psychotherapy.  Lanham, Maryland:  Rowman &Littlefield, 2010.  References to the text will be indicated by  page number.