Expanding Consciousness through Speech and Spoken Language

We have had more than one hundred years, counting roughly from Sigmund Freud and the development of psychoanalysis on, of increasing use and acceptance of psychotherapy in Western society. We have seen that psychotherapy is far more than a passing fad, ever more widespread and acknowledged in polite society, no longer restricted to use in cases of dire need and very extreme behavior. We are awash in psychology in bookstores'' self-help inventories, magazine and newspaper columns, TV shows that feature mass counseling and exposés of emotional snares and dilemmas. Moreover, almost no one who looks for help in times of emotional distress does so without consulting a therapist, a friend, or at the very least a written or electronic source. It is abundantly clear that psychotherapy is at its heart a communicative process, yet we have not much studied how the psychotherapeutic process works from a communication theory perspective. This book looks at how the communicative process is used in two different modes of psychotherapy to achieve successful adjustment, why it works when it works and why and how it fails when it does.