Language and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words Matter

(Paperback)

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Language plays a major role in our daily lives. Humans are specialized to live in a social environment, and our brains are designed to manage interactions with others which are, for the most part, accomplished through words. Language allows us to function both cognitively and interpersonally, and without language there are constraints on our ability to interact with others. Language also plays a major role in that specialized form of interpersonal interaction that we call psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. In that setting we use words to express and communicate meaning clearly, and through spoken language we help our patients to organize and modify their experiences of self and of the world, fostering adaptive change. Like the air we breathe, when our language serves its function it is transparent to us. We notice it most when it fails. When it does fail its basic function, in life and in psychotherapy, it fails to reliably, effectively, and comfortably help us to connect with others, as we deal with the world around us. In Language and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words Matter, Dr. Mary Davis addresses the role of language in our lives, both internally, in creating psychic structure and regulating affect, and interpersonally, in facilitating relationships with the figures that have shaped our development and that inhabit our adult lives. Using clinical material to illustrate, Davis looks at the development of language and its role in creating our personalities, at the life events which can distort our use of language to interact with others, and the ways that language can lead to misunderstanding as well as to understanding. Throughout, Language and Connection in Psychotherapy: Words Matter explores various facets of the ways in which words matter as well as the times when words are important but not sufficient to our ability to communicate interpersonally. Davis suggests that the psychotherapist is a master in bridging the gap between being and saying: she can be conceptualized as an interpreter, one who turns behavioral language into verbal language, action language into words, emotions into thoughts, who focuses and uses the capacity of words to help us connect both with our internal selves and with others.

Reviews

From the perspective of the brain, mental ideas are always expressed in the language of the BODY, and sometimes they are also expressed in the language of WORDS. Dr. Mary Davis weaves together a series of clear, sensitive, and fully alive clinical stories to illustrate how the analyst must become fluent in both languages in order to fully understand and communicate with the patient. This book makes it obvious that Dr. Davis exhibits the rare capacity to hone to the analytic task, while remaining fully engaged and fluid in how she connects with patients. -- Regina Pally, MD, Center for Reflective Parenting
Davis is a child/adolescent psychiatrist and "graduate psychoanalyst" for children and adults. She has been in practice since 1980. In this brief volume, she shares her understanding of how communication occurs in her therapeutic work with a wide range of patients. The volume is well written, and the jargon is scant. The author does not specify an intended audience; rather, she says that her intention is to share what she has come to understand about her work. She reveals her presence across a range of actual patients. She clearly has reflected, through her professional work, across major theorists, but this is not a scholarly volume per se. Davis writes of translating patients to oneself and then to them, of helping them see how others misunderstand their intent, and how they misunderstand the intentions of others. Chapters include easy-to-grasp case examples. This volume will be appreciated by undergraduates in developmental psychology courses and by beginning therapists in the helping professions. Davis conveys care, openness, readiness to regroup, and discipline without rigidity. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; professionals. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Mary Davis, MD, is a board certified psychiatrist and child/adolescent psychiatrist, as well as a graduate psychoanalyst for both children and adults. She has been in practice since 1980, working in inpatient, outpatient, and residential treatment settings. She has been interested in the ways in which language facilitates and interferes with our social functioning since her days in training.