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Understanding Continuity to Recognize Discontinuity

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Abstract

In this paper the author comments on the contribution by António P. Ribeiro and Miguel M. Gonçalves (in this journal) that offer a creative and unique perspective on maintenance and transformation of problematic self-narrative. From here the author contributes to the topic through the exploration of some issues: a) the relation, in the dialogical process of self-narrative construction, between semiotic processes that give voice to the semantic opposition and semiotic processes that give voice to the contradictory; b) the relation between sameness and ipseity in the self-narrative process; c) the role of a pathemic axis of meaning in the generation process of self-narratives. A final reflection is done on narrative as a device of clinical intervention in which the author makes a distinction between methods based on the recognition and extension of variability and methods based on the recognition of permanency so to get to variability.

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Notes

  1. We use the concept of organization in reference to Maturana, as an abstract representation of relations. In the case of narrative organization it is the semiotic process that give order to the flux of events in reason of a perspective and, in so doing, contribute to the definition of the relation between the subject and the experience.

  2. In this contribution, with reference to the works of Fornari (1976), Bion (1962, 1963, 1965) and Matte Blanco (1975) emotion is considered as a mind mode of functioning, ruled by specific logics, different from that of formal thought. On the background of what we have proposed can be found the idea that mental and symbolic processuality is a layered system with various gradients of interconnection between formal and emotional logic.

  3. A thing usually happening in a dialogue between good friends.

  4. In this paragraph my thinking is undoubtedly influenced by a psychodynamic matrix of thought that recognize to the perception of the absence a fundamental role in the generation of thought (Bion 1963).

  5. I realize that in this contribute all the question about the therapeutic relationship, as an intersubjective and dialogic field of sense building, have been leaved in the background; and this happened also to the question about narrative as a process of interpretative collaboration, of co-construction between a narrator and an interlocutor. I am sad for this reduction of the discussion field, caused by space reason, and I refer the reader to other contributions where I discussed this questions (Freda 2004, 2008a, b, 2010).

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Correspondence to Maria Francesca Freda.

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Freda, M.F. Understanding Continuity to Recognize Discontinuity. Integr. psych. behav. 45, 335–346 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-011-9169-4

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