Triadische Interaktionen zwischen erlebter und erzählter Geschichte

Triadic Interactions between Lived and Narrated (Hi)stories The article focuses on triadic thinking, a concept that has played a central role in the Milan School tradition. From a constructionist viewpoint, triadic thinking is redefined as a hermeneutic that involves the observer and encourages therapeutic change. The authors maintain that this hermeneutic has a privileged status in terms of therapeutic change. It introduces triadic fields of inference that are alien to the monadic and dyadic explanatory schemas on which clients’ narratives are constructed. Clients’ behavior can however be guided by these fields of inference because our lived history is at least triadic. Empirical findings support this thesis, demonstrating that patients mostly tell of their experiences in explicitly monadic or dyadic forms, whereas the implicit structure of lived experience is triadic. The resulting discrepancy between lived and narrated stories reveals itself to be a useful heuristic tool for generating therapeutic hypotheses and initiating narrative transformation processes. This perspective on therapeutic change underlines the value of triadic thinking for a clinical practice that takes patients’ subjective experiences seriously, minimizes iatronic risks, and views therapy as a dialog sustaining the creative co-construction of meaning.