Conclusions and Implications

Abstract

In producing this book, I was interested in how it was that I, as a therapist, could claim to change a person in a short space of time using talk as my only tool. I was inspired by Freud’s remark ‘by words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair’ (Freud, 1916–1917, p. 17; cf. de Shazer, 1994, p. 3) because in ways I felt the conversational tools I was using as a psychotherapist were merely an extension of what was available to me in ordinary conversation. I thus became interested in looking at how the ‘the talking cure’ works, the efficacy debate and if it really works, and the research methods used by training schools to support the view that therapy or their type of therapy works. Feeling disillusioned with the effectiveness debates, which have proved inconclusive, I became interested in how individual therapists could go about investigating the talk in their own practice with a view to developing it, because the ‘talking cure’, simply put, is just another form of human interaction. Therapists use ordinary structures of conversation to enact their business. However, training courses, offering qualifications in psychotherapy or supervision, tend to overlook the therapist’s use of language and focus instead on topics and themes and what the therapist is doing with the theory informing the practice.