Matters of Interpretation: Reciprocal Transformation in Therapeutic and Developmental Relationships with Youth

"The authors have initiated a revolutionary line of inquiry, sure to have a major impact across the full spectrum of fields that care about youth development. This ambitious theory and practice book marks a true innovation in teaching. Students . . . will gain a deeper respect for the developmental challenges and cultural complexities faced by the youth they wish to serve. Faculty and supervisors . . . will be amazed at how much more their students can learn when they are trained to use hermeneutic tools to study and support the lives of children and adolescents in the world." (Robert L. Selman, director, Risk and Prevention Program, and professor of psychology and education, Harvard University)

"How rare it is to open a chapter in a book of psychology and find a compelling story of human experience." (Frank Richardson, associate professor of educational psychology, University of Texas, Austin)

Matters of Interpretation presents and develops a self-reflective approach to therapeutic interventions and psychosocial research that is particularly relevant to working with children and adolescents at risk for negative life outcomes. The approach recognizes the value-laden aspects of human science and allows for the integration of the therapist's and the researcher's values into the processes of psychological inquiry and clinical or counseling psychology. At the core of this orientation is an explicit acknowledgment that therapists and researchers are not objective observers, but instead bring values, judgments, and prejudices to every client interaction and to every act of psychological inquiry.The theoretical framework behind the authors' approach is hermeneutics?fundamental for many years to philosophical and literary studies and of increasing interest to psychologists. Hermeneutics is the art or science of interpretation, such as the interpretation of values in philosophy or the interpretation of a text in literary studies. In this book, a distinctly expressed connection is made for the first time between the abstract realm of hermeneutics and the real world work of both applied psychology and psychosocial inquiry. The authors present a dynamic system wherein therapists simultaneously interpret their client's concerns and their own responses to these concerns. This interpretive process is presented both as a form of intervention and as a systematic approach to the study of human growth and change.The descriptive and theoretical presentations in Matters of Interpretation are richly enhanced by cases from graduate students in training in the Risk and Prevention Program at Harvard University. These original and very personal reflections document the students' in-depth self-assessment as "applied developmentalists"?counselors, therapists, and educators. The students find that working with clients using this approach is a deeply transformative process as it r