Mating with the world : on the nature of story-telling in psychotherapy

What is going on in a therapeutic setting when one person tells a story to another? Is it really as it appears to be, with the story being told in order to communicate some information, either affective or factual? Or is this way of thinking about the business of therapy limiting, both for the people concerned (therapist and patient) and for those who theorise about the therapeutic process? These are the questions around which this work is organised. The thesis itself takes the form of a story being told, the story of a therapist, his client, and his clinical supervisor.The story of these relationships is used to argue that stories are told more to create something (a relationship) and forge something (a more vital connection to an animating world) than to communicate something.The author draws on both a philosophical, and a psychoanalytical tradition to show what he suggest are more vital ways of thinking about human behaviour in general and the therapeutic encounter in particular