Nussbaumer, Nicolas

Individual Therapy at an Impasse and the Introduction of a Reflecting Team - 2016.


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This article retraces a process of individual therapy over a long period, which, stemming from a feeling of inability to progress, prompted the therapist to propose a change of setting to the man undergoing therapy. Over a period of six months, a reflecting team of four young systemic therapists enabled a new meeting between the patient and his therapist, notably by the use of metaphors and the cowriting of a letter addressed to a significant person in this man’s life. The therapist, as much as the patient himself, revisited and was transported to forgotten landscapes. While from this point on the therapy exerted a calming influence on the patient’s daily life, for the therapist it also provoked the reappearance of a partially lost identity in relation to his own family loyalties.