About Psychotherapist’s Certainty to Uncertainty, Double Bind and Paradoxes

Psychotherapy and constructivism

Abstract

The process of change of psychotherapist’s epistemology in the direction of certainty to uncertainty is described. The author presents some of his psychiatric and psychotherapeutic experiences which enable the progression towards greater flexibility, wisdom and elegance or aesthetics of change. The discovery of value of confusion, uncertainty, groundlessness and selflessness are some of the steps to a new epistemology and ecology of mind. I am using the psychotherapeutic case as a metaphor for the research of uncertainty and epistemological confusion that we are all sharing especially when we meet with the schizophrenic, the mystic or the poet. The double bind theory with its description of paradoxes in the communication can help us in this research. Patients are many times more flexible than the therapists and present a fruitful challenge for the therapist's epistemological evolution. The new kind of therapist with his or her positive attitude towards uncertainty awaits in an open way the unexpected and responds in with variety to the uniqueness of the patient and the therapeutic context.