Production of Meaning

This research work aims to investigate the manners by which the speaker’s knowledge are integrated into the meaning elaboration and to the self reconstruction in the psychotherapeutic work. This analysis has a qualitative approach, for which was adopted a phenomenological perspective. In order to investigate the cognitive-linguistic operations, which enable changes in psychotherapy, we have adopted the presuppositions of the enunciation studies (BENVENISTE, 1989; CHARAUDEAU, 2001, 2005) and formulations of the cognitive linguistics theorists (FAUCONNIER & TURNER, 2002; OAKLEY & HOUGARD, 2008, TURNER, 2014; BRANDT 2004, 2005, 2012; MARCHETTI, 2006, 2010). The identity structuring dynamic is analyzed through theoretical bases of Constructivism (MAHONEY, 1997,1998; GUIDANO, 1991, 1994, 1998; GONÇALVES & GONÇALVES, 2001). The corpus was obtained from audio recordings of therapeutic sessions and from published sessions. In the data analysis, we aimed at characterize the therapeutic work in terms of the dynamics of enunciation, analyze the mental process realized by the interlocutors and investigate the patient’s identity construction proceedings at the sessions. Four transcriptions of therapy sessions were analyzed, and the selection criterion was the presence of meaningful changes in the patient self-reference process. 
Among the results obtained by this research, should be highlighted: the contrast of perspectives have promoted the share of the interlocutors semantic networks, contributing to the implementing of changes; it was observed different manners of disconnection between the narratives, the experiences and the contexts in the patient’s discourse; the meanings that emerge from the patient’s speech assume some frame structures of the psychologist speech; the changes in the patient’s meaning process are closely related to the quality of the intersubjective relation between therapist and patient.