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This book provides an overview of studies on communication, and it focuses on the movement to and away from narrative (storytelling) communication to nonnarrative communication in dialogues. The authors' investigations are not concerned with examining patients' intrapsychic processes and instead concentrate on dialogue, that is, the communicative interactions between people.
According to the authors, an individual's communications
have a direct, surface meaning, which reflects something he or she is thinking about consciously, but they also reflect, indirectly, an unconscious attempt to adapt to the environment emotionally. This second level of meaning is apparent only when a client tells a story—that is, when a client uses narrative imagery that can encode unconscious emotionally charged material. (pp. xi-xii)
The authors' working hypothesis is that narrative communication is universal, and, because its output follows certain laws, it can be linked scientifically with other forms of measurable behavior.
According to the authors, clinicians should attend to the dialogue as well as to the patient's experience of the interaction. Langs writes, “Even when the therapeutic interaction is acknowledged, as it is in the systems-therapy approach, the focus remains on the client's inner experience of that interaction rather than on the dialogue and relationship with the therapist” (p. 6). I agree with the criticism of the common clinical strategy in relational and intersubjective approaches of focusing exclusively on the patient's experience of the interaction rather than on the dialogue or relationship itself.
The reader may ask, “How does one do that?” As therapists, we attend to the relationship or dialogue by listening to and understanding the mode of communication as well as what is communicated. Here I am distinguishing between listening to what the