In the theoretical part of my PhD thesis, I introduce narrative approaches and externalising conversations, which are the central themes of my research. In the empirical part, I first confirm thesis 1, i.e. that externalising ways of speaking are common in processes of support and help in social work and psychotherapy, that externalising conversations have been developed in narrative approaches as a unique, integrated and complex mode of dialogic collaborative practice, and that the difference between one and the other mode is in the epistemology of practitioners, which has implications for the purpose, goals and mode of use of externalisation. I confirm this thesis by means of an interpretative analysis of six approaches to psychotherapy and social work (psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, cognitive behavioural psychotherapy, systemic psychotherapy, transactional analysis, and integrative psychotherapy).
In the second part of the study, which was based on exam papers prepared by postgraduate social work students, a focus group of postgraduate social work students, and two case studies, I confirm my thesis 2, i.e. that conversations with externalisation and other characteristic elements of narrative approaches are an innovative way of professional practice in social work which significantly contributes to people taking a new perspective on themselves, their problems, their relationships, to the construction of new meanings or to a new understanding and, consequently, to a new, potentially more constructive behaviour. Among the expected effects of narrative dialogical practice through externalisation are: a (better) understanding of the problem, (the development of) a new perspective, the deconstruction of internalized social discourses, a weakening of identification with the problem, (the establishment of) new ways of acting, and the development of an alternative story.
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