You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Until recently psychotherapy of children and adolescents was considered almost exclusively a bi-personal process. This approach has become obsolete, mainly due to population growth, but also because the “social” - both as an object and an ideology — has become a professional discipline.
The needs intrinsic to the social system in which our discipline lies account for the common confusion between “deviant behavior” and “illness.”1 This confusion involves not only the psychiatric object (the patient), but also the psychiatric objective. The latter has become hazy and unclear, since the classic nosographic entities no longer apply. Along the same lines, therapeutic strategies have changed and the criteria for improvement have become as unclear as the diagnosis was in the first place.2
I will attempt to describe some strategies that I utilize with children and adolescents, strategies which are based mainly on theories of communication. These techniques apply primarily to brief psychotherapy.
When a child or adolescent displays his behavioral repertoire in our presence, he cannot avoid a basic rule of human communication: human beings not only communicate, but at the same time they communicate about their communication; they metacommunicate. Meta here means the instructions that are given the therapist as to how to interpret the discourse; the therapist, on the other hand, uses these instructions in his interpretation. Communication theorists have used the terms denotative and metacommunlcative to describe, respectively, the kind of communication that conveys information and the kind that assigns behaviors.