Introduction

Summary

This book is about psychotherapy. But it does not share the perspective normally adopted in the specialist research literature in clinical psychology. Instead, it sheds light on therapy from a perspective that plays a minor role in that literature. Rather than looking at therapist interventions in sessions, I look at the key role of the clients' experiences and activities in bringing about the outcomes of their therapy. What is more, since therapy is meant to work on the clients' troubles in their everyday lives outside sessions, I study the interplay between sessions and the clients' ongoing everyday lives between and after sessions in other places. I did so by following what goes on in the therapy sessions as well as in other social contexts of clients' ordinary lives outside sessions throughout a small number of family therapy cases. Indeed, in order to reach a more complete understanding of the workings of therapy, we need materials that cover what goes on in sessions as well as in other contexts of the clients' lives.

But the book is even more about persons in social practice. I use therapy as a case in point to study clients as persons changing in their ongoing everyday lives, among other things, in response to the deliberate change efforts of their therapy. However, as soon as we stop believing that personal change in relation to therapy occurs only within sessions, we need a theory that takes appropriate account of the fact that persons change and learn in the course of moving through a set of diverse social contexts: their sessions, home, school, workplace, and so forth.