In the Therapists Mirror

This book integrates the problem-solving focus of strategic family therapy with narrative therapy's emphasis on stories and the cultural context of meaning. It extends the rich and productive tradition of strategic therapy by embracing the importance of symbolic forms in creating and transforming experience. Marilyn Wedge uses engaging case examples to illustrate her central argument, that all experience, even the experience of one's own self, is a construction of signs. Drawing upon the power of symbolic forms to create meaning, she introduces a new theoretical position of semiotic constructivism. While symbols have long been a part of psychotherapy, the roles of such symbolic forms as myth, ritual, and polysemic or multivocal language in constructing meaning in therapy need to be reinterpreted in light of the postmodern era. This integration of strategic and narrative in the symbolic is laid out in the first half of the book. In the therapist's mirror the symbol becomes a structuring metaphor. It is the place where the therapist and client meet, where the jumble of life becomes meaningful, and where a strategic move has power. Here reality is made, and transformed, in the experience of our lives.