Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When
Save Liquid error (snippets/product-badge line 32): Computation results in '-Infinity'%
Author: Paul L. Wachtel
Publisher: The Guilford Press
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1572304162
ISBN 13: 978-1572304161
This uniquely practical volume examines precisely what the therapist can say at key moments to enhance therapeutic effectiveness and the process of healing and change. Through vivid clinical illustrations, the book illuminates why some communications in therapy are particularly effective, while others addressing essentially the very same content may actually be countertherapeutic. Wachtel's powerful integrative theory also provides new insights into how psychological disorder evolves, how it is maintained, and how psychotherapy contributes to change.
Review
"Wachtel, whose contributions have been at the cutting edge of contemporary approaches to psychotherapy, masterfully deals with the clinically delicate task of verbally presenting reality to patients. Wachtel astutely observes that in saying the unsaid, therapists often walk the fine line between clarification and accusation. Richly illustrated with clinical examples, Therapeutic Communication provides therapists with invaluable guiding principles that can enhance their clinical effectiveness." --Marvin R. Goldfried, PhD, State University of New York at Stony Brook
"Forget that speed reading course you took--this is a book that will absorb you so deeply you'll want to savor every paragraph, every sentence. Paul Wachtel has already given us some of the most creative books on psychotherapy, but Therapeutic Communication stands apart as a genuine masterpiece of clinical and scholarly wisdom. This is undoubtedly one of the most important books on psychotherapy in the last two decades. For the novice, it will orient and clarify therapeutic essentials, and for the seasoned clinician, it will reinvigorate and expand horizons. There is nothing else like it." --Alan Gurman, PhD, University of Wisconsin Medical School
"Paul Wachtel has been one of the most thoughtful and provocative writers on psychodynamic psychotherapy in recent years. He has made major contributions in the application of complex psychoanalytic ideas to the broader range of psychotherapies, and conversely has made important contributions to the rethinking and modernization of traditional psychoanalytic concepts. In this volume, he extends his model of cyclical psychodynamics to the important and largely unexplored area of the metacommunicational dimensions of the therapist's participation." --Stephen Mitchell, PhD, Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues
About the Author
Paul L. Wachtel, PhD, is CUNY Distinguished Professor at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His publications include Family Dynamics in Individual Psychotherapy (with Ellen F. Wachtel).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. The Talking Cure
2. Cyclical Psychodynamics I: Vicious Circles
3. Cyclical Psychodynamics II: The Centrality of Anxiety
4. Cyclical Psychodynamics III: Insight, the Therapeutic Relationship, and the World Outside
5. Accusatory and Facilitative Comments: Criticism and Permission in the Therapeutic Dialogue
6. Exploration, Not Interrogation
7. Building on the Patient's Strengths
8. Affirmation and Change
9. Attribution and Suggestion
10. Reframing, Relabeling, and Paradox
11. Therapist Self-Disclosure: Prospects and Pitfalls
12. Achieving Resolution of the Patient's Difficulties: Resistance, Working Through, and Following Through
13. Postscript: Therapeutic Communication with Couples, Ellen F. Wachtel