Resumen

GONCALVES, Miguel M. et al. Interacção terapêutica em momentos de ambivalência: Um estudo exploratório de um caso de insucesso. Aná. Psicológica [online]. 2012, vol.30, n.4, pp.467-490. ISSN 0870-8231.

Change in psychotherapy occurs through the emergence and expansion of exceptions to the client’s problematic functioning. However, these exceptions’ potential to promote change may be aborted by the attenuation of their meaning, when the client devaluates, trivializes or denies them. When this process repeats itself throughout the therapeutic process, clients are facing ambivalence, since there is a recurrent oscillation between two opposite positions (innovation - return to the problematic functioning). The present exploratory study aims at describing the therapeutic interaction within moments in which ambivalence occurs in an unsuccessful case using the Therapeutic Collaboration Coding System. Results suggest that ambivalence emerges mainly as a response to an intervention in which the therapist challenges clients usual (i.e., problematic) perspective. Moreover, results suggest that the therapist tends to respond to client’s ambivalence with a new challenge intervention which is generally followed by ambivalence or even invalidation from the client. Hence, when the therapist persists in challenging the client there is usually an escalation in clients’ discomfort, expressed in the evolution of a ambivalence response towards an invalidation response.

Palabras clave : Ambivalence; Single case study; Therapeutic collaboration; Therapeutic failure.

        · resumen en Portugués     · texto en Portugués     · Portugués ( pdf )