ABSTRACT
A corollary of this shift from realism to relativism is that as the apparent power of objective circumstances grows weaker, the power of language, broadly de®ned to include all symbolic means of labeling reality and regulating human behavior, grows stronger. In this view language is not simply a way of representing reality, it is a way of creating it, literally bringing new social realities into being in the terms that are used, whether in a casual conversation between two friends who agree that a co-worker is a ``bitch'' or in cultural discourses that de®ne ``beauty'' in terms that require the relentless pursuit of thinness. Constructivists and their close cousins, the social constructionists (Gergen, 1999), therefore grow interested in how people use language in a way that shapes and delimits how people appraise themselves, others (especially vulnerable others), and life dif®culties in ways that are problematic and disempowering. A spirit of ``resistance'' against the taken-for-granted assumptions of cultural ``texts'' in the service of personal or social transformation is especially evident in some PM approaches, like the narrative therapies to be discussed later.
