Transition Therapy

Abstract

The affirmative face of postmodern psychology and therapy describes more than dissolution of personal and cultural totalizing myths, for it has a deep faith that personal growth is an inherently continual process. It envisages a profound respect and sensitivity for the other, for it maintains that if truth is contextual and nonunitary, then the truths of others merit a voice as much as the subjugated stories of the self. Thus, development and therapy both concern ongoing transformation toward higher-order integra?tion and the discovery of factors that arrest, inhibit, or otherwise block rather than facilitate or promote it. But growth can take place on the horizontal as well as the vertical plane. Movement can follow the path to an alternate, better adapted state at the same level of complexity of a maladaptive one. Here, there is adaptive change, but without a qualitative leap to a superior level of functioning. In this sense human growth can be characterized as continual transition rather than continual transformation, per se, although it is granted that adaptive horizontal moves are facilitative of transformational ones.