Studies in Meaning 3: Constructivist Psychotherapy in the Real World

Abstract

We began to fear that this series had prematurely come to a halt. Instead, six years following the first volume, Studies in Meaning: Exploring Constructivist Psychology, and four years from the second, Studies in Meaning 2: Bridging the Personal and Social in Constructivist Psychology, the third volume of the series edited by Jonathan D. Raskin and Sara K. Bridges, has been published. Once again some of the most widely-known names of the diverse constructivist community have been called on to contribute to this volume. And again the editors have worked with a broad definition of psychological constructivism, maintaining its several expressions and derivations. In fact, the chapters making up this volume are written by authors that operate within personal construct psychology, social constructionism, the theory of autopoiesis, and narrative psychology: all approaches having their own identity, history, specificity, but sharing a similar epistemological matrix. The main object of the volume is to refute the belief, still unfortunately widespread among clinicians, that constructivism mainly is a philosophical idea with few practical applications, including those in the field of psychotherapy. The contributions included in the volume do indeed illustrate that constructivist therapy is well-suited to the expediencies of everyday clinical practice.