Abstract Internalized other interviewing is a therapeutic process in which a therapist invites a client to speak from their inner experience of the inner experience of another person. It is built on an assumption that, whenever we interact with another person, we build an impression of that other person’s experiences within ourselves, which then becomes part of us. If a therapist adopts this assumption and conceives of ‘the self’ of a client as constituted by an internalized community of other persons, it becomes coherent to interview any individual member of that inner community as an ‘internalized other’ within the client. Such an interview could be conducted with a client alone, or in the presence of the ‘actual other’ (the person being interviewed as an internalized other within the client). In the latter scenario, the actual other(s) ‘meet’ themselves as they exist within the client being interviewed, i.e., they meet their ‘distributed self.’ This interviewing process may be introduced to deepen interpersonal empathy and understanding. For instance, a husband may be interviewed as his wife, while she observes (and later gives feedback). Or a parent could be interviewed as their adolescent, and the adolescent could be interviewed as the parent, etc.
This process of interviewing the ‘internalized other’ and the ‘distributed self’ potentially expands the possibilities for therapeutic intervention and could benefit from a theory that might support this clinical practice. Maturana’s perspective on “how human beings come to know what they know” offers an explanation for how the human mind has arisen through an incredibly long drift in biological evolution and social development among living systems. His explanation emphasizes the importance of languaging and the centrality of ‘loving relationships’ in enabling creativity and change and provides some guidance in the application of these therapeutic practices.
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