ABSTRACT

The view of the self as dialogical and of psychotherapy as a dialogical practice has gained increased prominence in the last few decades in psychotherapy theory and practice (Hermans & Dimaggio, 2004). Research on psychotherapy based on dialogical principles, however, is not yet as developed. In this chapter, we present an approach to analysing psychotherapy sessions using dialogical principles and analytical tools. In what follows we briefly discuss the central tenets of dialogical approaches to the study of psychotherapy, outline and demonstrate through an example our approach, and discuss its usefulness for making sense of dialogical processes in psychotherapy.