-This book, which comprises contributions from many well known authors, takes an important step in the field of family therapy towards linking many fruitful approaches. Sheila McNamee (2004) recently suggested that we have reached the point when we should be promiscuous rather than remaining faithful to one pure approach. This allows us to enrich our skills rather than confining them. Nevertheless, we still need a shared focus. What better place to start than by exploring the space between the therapist and client. So much of our thinking has centered on both what therapists do, or what...

This book celebrates the life and work of Tom Andersen, who developed and promoted worldwide the reflecting conversation process, now referred to as dialogical or conversational practice, and which is transforming the practice of family therapy.

The volume illustrates Andersen's passion for inspiring and supporting local efforts to transform mental health services throughout the world. Some chapters describe projects in their local communities, in places as diverse as Africa, South America, and Central Europe, in which they have creatively applied some of Andersen's ideas to change...

Inspired by Daniel Stern's work on self-development, the authors suggest that by combining systemic therapy with a psychoanalytical aspect, family therapy can reach new depths. They argue that this will enrich our understanding of the relationships between parents and children, and between siblings.

This volume provides a positive and productive model for helping people move out of static positions or difficult relationships in the workplace. Informed by systemic thinking and social constructionism, the authors discuss how it is possible to create realities through dialogue and to enable greater opportunities for the employee, manager and consultant alike. Taking Positions in the Organization uses a model of semantic polarities to create simple solutions to complex problems in a format that will inform and enthuse all its readers.

Written by a well-established clinical...

This book is about how to maintain an aliveness to the possibilities in therapy and practice and how to challenge ideas of orthodoxy in theory and methodologies that can become stale or followed like religions. The central metaphor is the performance of practice emphasized in the spoken word and expressed in all its non-verbal complexity. How practitioners use every aspect of their being to communicate with the other in practice, how they shape and mold their words through gesture and other non-verbal actions in response to the gestures and words of others is a continually recursive process....

Several good books exist about systemic understanding in therapy and a few about dialogic understanding. However, none exist that try to bridge the gap between these two world views, which have some similarities, but also a whole array of differences.

The most striking difference between these two world views is the very vantage point for observation each of them holds. According to systemic theory, we exist only in and because of the network of relationships we are embedded in. In dialogic theory, we inhabit different worlds, and we need dialogue in order to make them communicate...