Psychotherapy and the Conversational Model

Robert Hobson (1920-1999) was an English psychotherapist who wrote the book Forms of Feeling: The Heart of Psychotherapy. In it he outlines the Conversational Model of psychotherapy. Hobson's approach is designed for the therapy of clients whose symptoms and problems arise from the defects or disturbances of significant relationships. Hobson says that the approach (or model) aims at the promotion of unlearning and of new learning in a dialogue between two persons. A situation is created in which problems are disclosed, explored, understood, and modified within a therapeutic conversation. The model is one of the best validated of all currently employed psychotherapies.

Here are some quotes from Hobson's book:
Psychological problems arise when people use inappropriate ways of dealing with past hurts, especially those involving loss and separation. Means of avoiding pain............ can result in actions which hamper personal growth. (p.183)

The practical procedures of the model are concerned with problem-solving in a personal conversation. Day-to-day practicalities, emotional memories, and secret individual experiences are important, but they are constantly related to the immediate experiencing of a relationship, here and now. (p.184)

Exploring a difficult problem demands a capacity to tolerate anxiety and stress, to stand in mysteries, uncertainties, doubts. It means staying with conflict and the acceptance of actions which, hitherto, have been rejected and unadmitted. Psychotherapy requires the maintenance of an optimum level of anxiety, arousal, and motivation. The ideal is a situation of relative safety in which a frank and open conversation can develop. (p.185-6)

A personal conversation, promoted in therapy, involves the differentiation and integration of many forms of language - modes of being with people. The crucial language of knowing is one which expresses, communicates, and shares feeling. (p.195)

From R. F. Hobson, Forms of Feeling: The Heart of Psychotherapy, London: Tavistock, 1985.

The other founder of the conversational Model is Russell Meares, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, the University of Sydney. Meares says that the Conversational Model is built on the idea that psychotherapy is directed towards the restoration of a disrupted sense of personal being, or self.

For more detail on Meares' thought see his book The Metaphor of Play: Origin and Breakdown of Personal Being, 3rd ed., East Sussex: Routledge, 2005.