NARRATIVE AND MEDICINE 2012

Title of the paper:

“Searching for trust: Towards a full recognition of alterity in psychotherapy”

Abstract: Within psychotherapy, dialogical perspectives have been arising as a promising pathway of development in the last two decades. This presentation will focus upon the developmental processes by which trust is achieved, in two interconnected directions: the development of a trusting relationship in client’s life; and the building (and the tear and repair movements) of a trusting relationship between client and therapist. Clients usually bring to psychotherapy life stories in which distrust plays a central role, stories in which the Other is somehow built in a distrustful way, prolonging the past into the future. It will be illustrated how their change involve a development of trust in others, and some specific processes by which this takes place will be presented (e.g., putting words in silenced experiences). Trust lies at the very core of this social situation, and a delicate balance between trust and distrust, showing and hiding, moving back and forth are established between therapist and clients. Some possible pathways of development will be analyzed, including those in which there is a degradation of the relationship between therapist and client. Some possible implications of these developmental routes to everyday life will be sketched.

Biographical information: JOÃO SALGADO, Ph.D., is the Head of Department of Psychology and Communication at ISMAI, Portugal. He is also a psychotherapist and the Director of the Counseling Service of his university. His main research interests are associated with the developments of a dialogical perspective within psychology, and with the applications of this framework to the field of psychotherapy and clinical psychology. At the moment, he is the Principal Investigator of a research project founded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the Portuguese national agency for R&D, named “Decentering and Change in Psychotherapy”.