r The Association for Family Therapy 2006.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Journal of Family Therapy (2006) 28: 370387 0163-4445 (print); 1467-6427 (online)

Hypotheses are dialogues: sharing hypotheses with clients

Paolo Bertrandoa and Teresa Arcellonia

The use of systemic hypotheses in therapy has been criticized on the ground that it promotes the expert position of the therapist and tends to underplay the role of the client in the therapeutic process. In this article, we propose to view the systemic hypothesis as a collaborative action, involving the dialogue between therapists and clients. This interactive hypothesis is created by the very interaction of all participants in the therapeutic dialogue, and as such it may be considered a dialogue in itself. The article articulates a way of hypothesizing that is consistent with both systemic and dialogic premises, and presents some examples of the process in action.

The systemic hypothesis is but one example of a process which is probably universal in therapy: the process of making sense of what happens both within the therapeutic encounter and in the lives of clients (see Frank and Frank, 1991). In the pages that follow, we will deal mostly with this kind of therapeutic hypothesis, which shows a number of distinctive features. The most important is that, according to the concept of systemic hypothesis proposed by the original Milan Team, it is impossible to know the reality of a person or a family. We may just make a hypothesis about it, which is, per se, neither true nor false, it is simply either more or less useful (Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1980, p. 215). Although we still use the hypothesizing process in our clinical practice, the sense we give to hypotheses, and the very way of formulating them, has undergone a change. The extent and origins of such a change are the subject of this article.

Ezio, or the hypothetical partner

Our way of hypothesizing changed for two main reasons, one ethical and the other practical. We would like to give an example of the
Episteme Centre, Turin, Italy Corresponding address: Paolo Bertrando, MD, Ph.D., Piazza S.Agostino, 22, 20123 Milan, Italy. E-mail: gilbert@fastwebnet.it.
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former reason, through a clinical encounter, which happened during a training course in systemic therapy held by one of us. The encounter with Ezio comes from aborted couple therapy: his wife declined to participate, and the result was an individual therapy centred on a couple problem, although according to Ezio: The problem its me . . . my difcult disposition. Apparently, Ezio is burdened by such a huge responsibility. He is tense and restless, playing unceasingly with his wedding ring while he asks for advice about what he should do. Divorce? Reconcile? Stay together for his daughters sake? Cohabitate with his wife as separated at home? The therapists two women in training ask hypothetical questions about the future, about the characteristics a woman with whom he would like to share his life should have. I would like her . . . to be single, answers Ezio, a little puzzled. Behind the mirror, the atmosphere is red hot. The therapeutic team, mostly constituted of young female trainees, cannot restrain its indignation towards this 40-year-old man with such a scarce consideration of women. The idea emerges, however, that our client is emotionally blocked, and that the block is now extending to the therapists. We decide that the female teacher (the second author) will enter the therapy room in order to embody the emotions. She enters and sits beside a surprised Ezio, almost turning her back on the two colleagues. Ezio, bewildered but interested, listens to her: Behind the mirror, she says, we were struck by the non-motives you talked about. It is like there were some emotional knots you put aside, substituting for them something more rational. How do you feel with those knots? We feel a strong suffering you hardly talk about . . . you say you married a woman you were never very involved with . . . maybe your wife helps you to dampen your emotion and suffering. Our prejudice is that a man always looks for something in a woman, but maybe for you it is too painful to say what you were looking for in your wife? Ezio is more and more puzzled. His eyes go from one woman to the other in the room, as if he cannot understand the supervisors point. In the discussion behind the mirror, we feel the need to share with Ezio the process that dictated the intervention. Without such a sharing, the therapy appears incomplete to everybody. A colleague says: It is like we laid an ambush for him. Thats not fair, he must know our intentions! We decide that the teacher will go back to Ezio, together with the two therapists, to tell him openly that, with her presence, she was supposed to embody the emotions in order to bring into the room the parts of his stories which for some reason he
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tended to omit. Ezio listens attentively to these words; then, with some relief, he says: A kind of shock therapy, isnt it? What happened here tended to happen more and more frequently. The idea was that unveiling the whole hypothesizing process to clients could make the power balance between therapists and clients more ethical, solving, at the same time, some stuck situations as the one we presented here. The training context was instrumental in bringing forth the change, because trainees tend to be extremely attentive to the unfolding of interactions between therapists and clients. Gradually, this way of working spread in our everyday practice, because it also responded to a practical need, especially for individual therapy. And this process led us to a further step, which is sharing the hypothesizing process with the clients at the moment it happens. But to fully understand such evolution, we must rst turn to the relationship between the hypothesis and therapeutic dialogue and to the different versions of it.

The therapist and her hypothesis

First of all, we think it is impossible not to have hypotheses within any dialogue, especially if the conversation deals with a certain problem. As semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce (19311958) puts it, we tend to create hypotheses when confronted with something difcult to understand. When something does not t with our frame of reference, we build a hypothesis in order to deal with it. Peirce calls this process abduction. Not all hypotheses are the same, though. We can distinguish, rst, between ontological and relational hypotheses: the rst ones refer to the being of individuals, the second ones to the relationship between them (e.g. one person may be considered aggressive, or her aggressive behaviour may be considered within its interpersonal context). We choose to call ontological hypotheses ideas, leaving the term hypothesis to relational ones. Another distinction is between explicative and process hypotheses. We may say that the former refers to why, the latter to how (see Rober, 2002). In systemic therapy, which is the eld of our clinical work, the therapist should ideally formulate relational and process hypotheses, although it is impossible to abstain completely from ontological and explicative ones. Another distinction concerns the use of hypotheses within the dialogue. Everybody, in a dialogue, has a point of view, and tends to allow that point of view to enter the discourse (the world) of the other. We can say, thus, that it is impossible to enter a dialogue without ideas
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or hypotheses. Even within the most open dialogue, the speakers strive to conrm their hypotheses, consciously or not. In a therapeutic dialogue, this interplay between discourses can have very different characteristics. Some therapists use their hypotheses in order to drive the conversation, trying to steer in a predened direction. Others use their hypotheses to open the conversation, introducing and stressing differences. The rst position was prevalent in the early years of systemic therapies, the second in later years. In a way, the evolution of systemic therapy is the evolution in the role of hypotheses. Strategic therapists had explicative hypotheses, considered as approximations to actual reality (Haley, 1976; Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1978). Although the hypothesis of the early Milan team (Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1980) was explicative, it was also provisional, neither true or false, without any possibility of reading the actual reality of a family or client. In Luigi Boscolos and Gianfranco Cecchins version of the Milan hypothesis (see Boscolo et al., 1987), it becomes a process hypothesis, derived from team interaction, but it remains secret: the team builds up an explanation that must stay secret in order to cure. The therapist presents herself as a person who knows but does not say. Clients react to an intervention based on a hypothesis, and not directly to the hypothesis (which, to them, remains unknown). The systemic hypothesis belongs solely to the therapeutic team. Tom Andersen (1987), introducing his reecting team, makes a crucial move in the evolution of the therapeutic dialogue. For the rst time ever, the therapeutic team opens to clients its sancta sanctorum leaving secrecy behind. The team dialogue becomes open, while the process of listening comes to the forefront. Listening to each other, all the actors in the double dialogue become more respectful, and abandon the tendency to immediate action that systemic therapy had inherited from its strategic predecessors. In the public discussion of the team, the tone of comments changes. The therapists become more respectful towards clients, and, at the same time, more ready to acknowledge the positive aspects of the presented situations. Such a practice, though, leads to an eclipse of the hypothesis. Within the reecting team, therapists talk, discuss, but do not try to build systemic hypotheses. They offer, mostly, opinions about what clients said, with the aim of making them feel understood and legitimized, putting forward different points of view. According to Andersen: One way to achieve this was to avoid to have any ideas beforehand. Hypotheses were omitted if possible (Andersen, 1991, p. 13).
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Conversational therapists (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992; Anderson, 1997) are the most straightforward followers of the postmodern imperative: give voice to clients and diminish the (hierarchical) differences between them and the therapist. Conversational therapy eliminates both hypothesizing process and team discussion, and theorizes a not-knowing position for the therapist. This is a seminal innovation,1 but it has sometimes been interpreted (even against their originators intention) as an exhortation to the therapist to abstain from any denite idea or hypothesis. Probably most reecting team and conversational therapists are averse to hypotheses because they consider hypotheses as strategic instruments to drive the client in a pre-established direction, and at the same time a way of dening a presumably objective reality once and for all. We believe, instead, that a hypothesis can be used that way, but that it can also be used as we use it as a way to create a conversational eld, where the main subject is relationships. Our hypotheses tend to be process hypotheses, related to how (in which kind of possible world) the issues presented in the dialogue exist. Hypotheses of this kind do not close the dialogue nding a cause and a problem-solving strategy, but rather they open it, although with some limits: they select some discourse elds rather than others. For example, systemic hypotheses tend to create relational discourses, and it may sometimes be better to abandon them and use non-systemic hypotheses instead.

Hypotheses, teams, dialogues

How can the hypotheses be articulated in the therapeutic dialogue? To understand this, we must keep in mind two dimensions: setting and process. From the point of view of setting, the issue is the separation between therapeutic (i.e. therapistclient) dialogue and team dialogue. From the point of view of process, the issue is whether or not to use ideas and hypotheses (or, better, to do it explicitly). In the classic systemic model, the dialogue between therapist and client is separated from the dialogue within the therapeutic team. Therapists are not only allowed to make hypotheses, they are advised and even forced to make them, but strictly within the team dialogue.
1 Although the historically minded reader could nd in it echoes of Laings antipsychiatry (Laing, 1968), Italian critical psychiatry (Basaglia, 1968), and, on different grounds, of Carl Rogers client-centred approach (see Anderson, 2001).

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Clients are not allowed to participate in the team dialogue or to listen directly to the hypotheses as such. The one-way mirror is a barrier that only the active therapist can trespass, going back and forth, acting as intermediary between team and clients. Here the mirror is, above all, a metaphor the important thing is the inner mirror, which the systemic therapist cannot, or does not want to, relinquish. In comparison, the reecting team model involves two distinct dialogues (one between the active therapist and the clients, another among the observers) but there is no direct communication between the two sides of the mirror, since the active therapist always stays in the therapy room. When the observers talk among themselves, the clients and the therapist can only listen and, conversely, when they dialogue, the observers stay silent. The clients listen to the observing teams words, as, in classic systemic therapy, they listen to the therapists nal intervention. The difference is that they listen to a discussion instead of an intervention devised behind the mirror. They may afterwards reect on the teams reections, but they never can participate in them in other words, they cannot alter the course of the dialogue. From the point of view of process, these therapists make a considerable effort in order not to start from preconceived ideas or hypotheses. In the conversational model, there are no mirrors. There is just one dialogue between therapist(s) and client(s) where no hypothesis is formulated and the therapist just keeps open the conversation (Anderson and Goolishian, 1988). Apparently, to be on an equal footing with the client, the therapist should not have ideas especially in the form of denite hypotheses which could inuence clients or suggest to them what to do.2 What we nd problematic in such a position is the possibility for the therapist, in this open dialogue stance, not to have hypotheses. We could say that the therapist needs to build a sort of inner mirror in order not to see the ideas and hypotheses she is unwittingly constructing. Our goal is to eliminate the separateness of dialogues (the real and metaphoric mirrors), while at the same time keeping the hypothesizing process. This we try to obtain by sharing our hypotheses with the clients. What emerges in the therapists mind is shared with the client in the very moment of its emergence. This means that clients become more active in directing the course of therapy. This has radical
2 Rober (2002) brings back the hypothesis in conversational therapy, but refers just to the inner dialogue of the therapist the hypothesis cannot be an issue to discuss between therapists and clients.

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consequences in the relationship between therapists and clients, from the point of view not only of ethics, but also of the therapeutic process. This means, in fact, that within the therapeutic conversation a hypothesis emerges that I, as therapist, suggest on the basis of some element provided by the clients. Then I, together with the clients, improve it, until the nal hypothesis (if it emerges) becomes a sort of common heritage for all of us. What emerges from this process is still a hypothesis, not a truth, for both clients and therapists. This is the main difference from an analytical interpretation, which is grounded in a rm authority principle.3 By co-evolving hypotheses in this way, the client could learn (or deutero-learn, following Bateson, 1942) a systemic way of reasoning. We may well dene this kind of hypothesis as a dialogical hypothesis; that is, a hypothesis which lives and exists as a dialogue. The hypothesis does not follow from the dialogue, it is the dialogue (and vice versa). In systemic individual therapy (see Boscolo and Bertrando, 1996), when I build my hypothesis together with the client, I am teaming up with her, as if we are a reecting team without other fellow therapists. In other words, I pass from one side of the mirror to the other. Although the client is asked to be very active in the hypothesizing process, it is still the therapist who should have an idea of how to lead the dialogue (I should have some idea, as far as possible, of what I am doing and where I am going). We could summarize the change by saying that in the beginning we, as systemic therapists, had a real team with us; then, we had an internalized team (Boscolo et al., 1995); today, we team up with our clients.

The hypothesis is a dialogue

A hypothesis may catalyse possibilities for evolution when the hypothesizing process happens within a therapeutic frame. But how is such a frame dened? Or, better, what is the difference between a therapeutic dialogue and a commonplace, everyday conversation? We might say that the very denition of a therapeutic relationship is the therapeutic frame. A therapy is a therapy because it is dened by a relationship where the rules of everyday relationship are suspended (Bertrando, 2006). What makes a therapy a therapy is exactly the specicity of the conditions of a non-everyday dialogue.
3 For the concept of psychoanalytical interpretation, see Laplanche and Pontalis (1967). For its use in transference analysis, see Gill (1982), Bertrando (2002). For some transcribed examples, see Gill and Hoffman (1982).

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The therapeutic dialogue, however, is also an everyday dialogue. If it were not, what happens within the therapeutic frame would be real only within that frame, and would not be transferred outside (in real life). We may say that a therapy is only successful when what emerges within its frame is somewhat transferred to life outside the therapy room. But the therapeutic frame, in turn, is not born in a void. The actors of the therapeutic dialogue, namely therapists and clients, bring their own respective ways of framing their worlds to the conversation. Thus therapy is an encounter of frames, the one brought by the therapist and the one brought by the client, because all human beings live in a world made predictable by the rules dened by a frame, but creativity and novelty may emerge only by going outside of the known frames.
Cultural stability depends upon shared rules and frames, and if the rules and frames are shared there will be no change. If the rules and frames are not shared, there can be no communication. On the other hand, the two person do not operate in vacuo and it is therefore possible that operating upon shared rules and frames they reach a point at which they stub their toes upon the environment. The rules and frames may than be called in question. Moreover, two persons operating with discrepant system of rules and/or discrepant frames, may be so frustrated in their attempts to communicate that the rules of one or both person are ultimately called in question. (Bateson, 1953)

The above statement may not necessarily apply however, because different frames are successfully shared. If they are not, building real systemic hypotheses becomes impossible. It is easier to organize ideas in hypotheses if we develop the ability to listen to what our interlocutors have to say. Indeed, it is impossible to organize them when the interlocutors are deaf to each other. We often see such a process in the teamwork of very inexperienced systemic trainees. Rather than hypotheses, it is easy to hear gossip or individual bravura pieces that are not caught by anybody else and can hardly coalesce into hypotheses. In this sense, any real systemic hypothesis is a dialogue. A therapist who builds hypotheses on her own relies on her inner dialogue (see Rober, 2002). But the inner dialogue is in itself monodic rather than polyphonic. The different voices of the inner dialogue always tend to be fused in one single voice which will originate ideas (ontological hypotheses) rather than relational hypotheses. Here, to
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share and discuss our own hypotheses with the clients while accepting, of course, the clients hypotheses means to open our frame, accepting that the language (the world) of the other will enter into ours. According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1935/1981), the world of language (or, better, of languages) is characterized by a twofold dimension. In any time and place, there is a centripetal force that drives language towards unication and uniformity. At the same time, however, a centrifugal force exists that leads to a condition Bakhtin names heteroglossia (raznorecie), that is to say the co-presence of different languages: A diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices. . . this internal stratication [is] present in any language at any given moment of its historical existence (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, pp. 262263). Heteroglossia guarantees the vitality of languages, which are alive only in dialogue, and would die (become still and fruitless) in uniformity. The important thing is dialogization, which means, rather than a dialogue between persons, a dialogue between different languages (which, to Bakhtin, means different conceptions and experiences of the world). This constitutes not a unity, but a polyphony of speech genres, where speech genres concern the different social groups, the ways of speaking and writing, the idiosincratic individual discourses, which give form to shared speech (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, pp. 288289; see also Bakhtin, 1986). We may dene our therapy as dialogic only if the therapeutic conversation acquires the characteristics of dialogue according to Bakhtin (see also Seeikkula, 2003); that is, a polyphonic cohabitation of different discourses and different visions, from which possibly a new vision (a new language) may emerge, but where the difference of discourses is accepted anyway. The striving to persuade the interlocutor to accept my point of view is substituted with the nurture of an active understanding on his part, in the sense that anything that is said is assimilated by the listener in a new conceptual system.
The speaker strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationship with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory, against his, the listeners, apperceptive background. (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, p. 282)
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The therapist not only works on the relationships the client is embedded in, but also on her inner dialogue (or her ability to have an inner dialogue). For the client who is stuck in her ideas and explanations, the hypothesis organizes such ideas through a dialogue with the therapist, thus also allowing the development of her own inner dialogue. This means that sharing hypotheses with clients may be necessary, in systemic individual therapy, because the client is the only possible interlocutor, and she may cure us of solipsism a professional malaise which all therapists risk. Although in distinct spheres, Bateson and Bakhtin raise a similar problem; that is, how can we evade the tendency to uniformity and repetition? One solution is dialogue. This is why the hypothesis, a constitutive part of the therapeutic dialogue, should enter explicitly into the conversation. It is necessary that the visions and experiences of the world of therapist and client can meet, maybe even clash, and bring forward the emergence of novelty not completely guided (submitted to conscious purpose) by the one, nor by the other.4 Not knowing may thus become knowing together. Of course, the therapist must be aware, within this process, of her responsibility (Bianciardi and Bertrando, 2002), of her unavoidable position within a power system (Foucault, 2003; White, 1995; see also Guilfoyle (2003) for an analysis of power in dialogical therapy), of her prejudices (Cecchin et al., 1994). Here a substantial difference remains between therapist and client. The latter may well be unaware of all these dimensions, especially at the beginning of therapy. However, the dialogical work around her hypotheses and those of her therapist may make her aware of prejudices, positions, emotion, which she did not know beforehand, took for granted, or did not fully understand.

A clinical case: Diana

Diana, 33, is an architect who works for a public agency. An only child and single, she lives with her parents,5 and has an ofcial ance, Maurizio, although she has rather frequent affairs with other men. She has been in therapy with the rst author for almost a year, for what she denes as her inability to feel emotion, to be deeply moved
4 For a criticism of conscious purpose, see Bateson (1968a, 1968b), and Harries-Jones (1995). 5 Such a condition is rather common in Italy, where this therapy was conducted, and it is not to be considered an anomaly, as it would probably be in most Anglo-Saxon countries.

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by something, to feel her own desires. More than once, to the therapists question: What do you really want? she has answered: I dont know, if I knew I would not be here. She is a good client, always punctual for her hour, but every time she appears distressed, because, she states, she has absolutely nothing to say. During the therapy, the therapist tackled her emotional anaesthesia, connecting it to her relationship with her parents, a couple she perceived as cold but unstable, needing her calm, unemotional presence to stay together. During an encounter in an advanced phase of the therapy, Diana puts some themes on the table. She has to decide whether to accept a possible house to rent or whether to go and live with Maurizio, who appears, as usual, not to be convinced of her commitment to him. Diana insists on her general difculty in making a choice. Her feeling of unsteadiness surfaces, together with her reections about her relationship with her ance, and the feeling of a connection between her reaction to Maurizios proposals and her past experience with her parents. This is not a clear-cut hypothesis, but rather a dim idea of how she feels. We will now offer a transcription of a lengthy part of the session, leaving our comments for later.
Diana [D]: Well, I was thinking about an image from my childhood. There are scenes I remember with my mother. My mother has three sisters, so I grew up with my cousins, their siblings. I remember, well, it was not a class thing, but when there was a birthday, there was a little party, etcetera, and my mother had this ability of making me have something different from them, the presents, the party, and I hated not being the same as my cousins. Sometimes I hated her presence, a real broody hen, though I was with my aunts, my cousins, when we went around. I remember some red slacks, that my mother told one of my aunts to buy for my birthday, because she liked them, and I was wondering why I could not receive the same things, the same presents as my cousins. This feeling of being different, because my mother . . . Therapist [T]: You mean . . . ? The same things, for example, what? D: Toys, nothing special. But the fact is, my mother made me feel different, because she said they had to give me those red slacks instead of . . . other things. It was irritating. I am starting to think about those years, now. She seemed convinced that she knew me, I dont know . . . T: I feel it wasnt that your mother was convinced she knew you, but that she was convinced she knew better than you what was good for you. This
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is the common factor in all the three episodes you told me [in previous sessions]. In all of them, it was the same: I know its better for you not to become a professional swimmer, I know you have to study every day, and I know whats the colour you like for your trousers. D: Sure! Its a continuing . . . [pause] T: Apparently, apart from how your mother really was as a person, what she left in your memory is this thing of not being able to understand you. And to be convinced, instead, that she could understand you perfectly, that she could decide in your place. On the one hand, every time you think about it, you get mad at your mother, on the other . . . D: There was this photo of the two of us on the couch, and I still remember how much I was nervous, at that time, because I didnt want to do it. My mummy, instead, loved to take pictures on the beach, or at birthdays parties, etcetera. I remember making a comment about it some years ago, when we were watching these pictures, taken when I was 6 or 7: Mummy, do you know how I hated to be photographed? When I say this kind of thing, shes always taken aback, because she doesnt understand. She didnt understand and she didnt see my point, and maybe I wonder whether it was me, the person incapable of transmitting my opinion, my advice. Maybe I accepted it all, I remained silent, and she had good reasons to believe that I agreed. This is the implication, this is why the anger is always directed towards her, because she was thinking things, and believing she knew my taste, or . . . and, on the other hand, the anger towards myself, because when this kind of thing happens at work, afterwards I say to myself: Why didnt I say it, why didnt I do it, why didnt I express it? But I know that Im stuck with that sort of internal block, and I cant. ... T: Here the common factor between what you tell about the past and what you tell about the present is that you are blocked. There are these things and you dont speak for yourself. In the past, I dont hear your voice very much, I hear your mothers. D: Sure, and its the same today. My feeling is, if I manage to say something, usually its whispered. I dont speak up, I ask for approval. Yes, generally, this is my approach. I cant discuss, I whisper. Even when I know that the person on the other side is wrong, if he tells me No, its like this and this and this, I cant. I wont say I dont have the strength, but . . . I dont know what I lack inside. This creates some problems at work, because afterwards they tell me: Why didnt

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you tell him? There are things that I should say, but . . . they dont come out. T: Why couldnt you react against your mother? You were not afraid of your mother, I feel, the things different. I was wondering (I make my fantasies, then you tell me if they make sense) . . . I was trying to put together this and what you told me about your family at the very beginning of your therapy: everything was centred around your father, he was the disturbing gure for you. . . . Now, why did your father make things difcult, more for your mother than for you? My idea is, if you had to protect your mother at any cost, then you couldnt possibly confront her. D: But that happened afterwards! T: Afterwards chronologically? D: Yes, sure, because there . . . today were talking about primary school, maybe the fth or sixth grade. T: At primary school there wasnt this thing with your father? D: No, sometimes my mother had something to complain about, but it was nothing special. My father became a burden afterwards, from the ninth grade up to secondary school. My parents gave me problems at different times. T: At different times. But I feel, however, that you had somehow to support your mother, to think she was right. It was a kind of an absolute duty. D: No. Its just that my mother had always been more practical, so when my father kind of lost his head, it was easier for me to cling to her, because I felt she could hold it all together. Maybe I feel the anger coming now that things are quieter, so I am more detached, I dont see her in this role anymore. T: Maybe this thing, of having to show your solidarity to your mother, because of your fathers disorientation, prevented you from rebelling against her afterwards. You never showed rebellion in adolescence. I wont say you should have, but most people do rebel in adolescence. You had your reasons not to do it. You gave in as a child, as a young girl, at 15 you could not get angry, because there was this other problem, I think . . . D: Yes, probably I didnt want to add more problems . . .

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T: . . . or you couldnt. I think it was not a decision on your part. Its like you felt you couldnt do it. Like it disappeared from your awareness, it never occurred to you that you could get angry towards your mother because she was so coercing. D: I would say it didnt even cross my mind at the time. Its terrible. T: It didnt cross your mind, maybe, because at the time it was so vital that you and your mother clung to each other . . . how I imagine it, it wasnt just you clinging to your mother, but both of you clinging to each other. You gave me the impression that you didnt see your mother as a rock to grasp, but that the two of you were like two logs trying to stay aoat in a fast owing river. D: In a sense its like that. I didnt choose. Maybe today, after all these years, these memories resurface and they are stronger. If things had been different, when I reached adolescence I would have started to assert myself . . . I said to myself: Whats the use in saying anything? since she didnt get anything . . . so I accepted. But now I start remembering it all . . . T: Its as if today, after talking a lot about it, you allow yourself to remember things that hurt you, but that have been buried for a long time, that did not cross your mind straightaway. D: No, my father was the most immediate, the most obvious problem. My mother, for better or worse, has always been a stronger point of reference than my father, and therefore, notwithstanding what Ive just said, shes always been more of a security. T: Yes, but, from what youre saying, after a while she became too strong a security, too strong a point of reference. Its like you were saying, She was too strong a security, and it somehow led me to lose my personal bearings. I dont know where are my points of reference anymore. D: Sure. T: Thats probable. I think that, for you, the issue is to make peace with the mother you carry inside you. The actual mother you have now is not so similar anymore to the mother of the past . . . and maybe the mother you carry inside you was never so alike the mother you had in reality. But you have to settle scores with that one, the one you have inside.

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D: How can I do it? T: Youre doing it already. I think its a slow process, you cannot think that one day you remember some things, and those things just snap, and youre changed. Its not like that. You can see, now, how you gradually discover or rediscover things that were not obvious at all. It took some time for you to bring them out. D: Some memories, sometimes. But its not a burden, maybe . . . T: Maybe you couldnt see that those memories had strong links to whats happening to you now. They are not just memories, they are memories that show you some facets of yourself that are still there. Rather than memories, they are ways of being with other people that you still have to overcome, and are not so easy to overcome. Maybe some day you will even be able to talk this over with your mother.

In this dialogue, the therapist has to reorganize his hypothesis. At the beginning, after the rst two exchanges, he tries to organize data he gathered in previous sessions, in order to give some sense both to the mothers behaviour, Dianas responses, and her present feelings. Since Dianas rst answers are reassuring, the therapist cooperates with her to improve the hypothesis. The idea is that the mothers voice became so loud it suffocated Dianas, thus fostering her basic uncertainty about her own feelings. The therapist is quite straightforward in putting forward his hypothesis (In the past, I dont hear your voice very much, I hear your mothers). Diana not only accepts it, but goes on and enriches it. Then, the therapist proposes (although in a tentative fashion: I make my fantasies, then you tell me if they make sense) a new hypothesis, to explain why the target of Dianas anger, in the entire rst part of the therapy, had been her father. This time, Diana contradicts the hypothesis. The triangle hypothesized by the therapist (Diana who confronted her father to gain support and love by her extremely demanding mother) does not persuade her. The therapist, now, must nd something different, some new elements to help Diana build a hypothesis that may make sense for her. At this point, therapist and client start working together, each of them adding little bits of ideas. At last, they agree on a new relational hypothesis. Then, the therapist modies it slightly in order to retrospectively give Diana a more active and competent role towards a less powerful and terrible mother. Now Diana can choose what to decide, whether to speak or stay silent, whether to look for her peace or not. And the
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therapist suggests she has already started to choose to rediscover her memories and give them new meanings.

Conclusions
In the conversation with Diana, the therapist is collaborative and smooth. He asks many questions, proposes some reframings, but without becoming openly directive. This is not necessarily always the style of this therapist. With other clients he may be more passive and attentive, or more active and structuring. In a dialogical therapy it is not the therapists style that dictates what happens in the dialogue but the opposite; that is, the dialogue dictates the therapists style within that dialogue. If the therapist really participates in the dialogue, and does not set it up as a monologue where she tries to impose herself on the client, or as a monologue of the clients, where she just listens with sparse comments to what the client has to say, then the dialogue becomes an environment where the therapist may allow one of a number of possible styles to come to the surface. The therapists discourse may blend smoothly with the clients, as in this case, or may contrast it. But it is always in a dialogical relationship with the clients discourse, accepting it and its specicity. In this process, a respectful therapist should not be afraid of her ideas and beliefs. We believe it is indispensable for the therapist to bring himself, what he thinks, and his hypothesis, within the dialogue, facing dialogically the clients discourse. So far we have largely discussed individual therapy, and clearly the `-vis a single client favours dialogical context of a single therapist vis-a hypotheses. But we believe that also in the more complex context of family therapy, where a team faces a family, hypotheses may enter the dialogue. This implicates a polyphonic process, and asks of the team (not just the active therapist) some humility and the denitive rejection of any therapeutic omnipotence. If the clients are the experts of their own stories (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992), then they are also the privileged interlocutors for building hypotheses on those stories. The nal crucial point is that, in this perspective, the therapist must be aware of her own responsibility (Bianciardi and Bertrando, 2002). This means that the therapist is ethically responsible for everything she brings to the dialogue, and that the fact of participating in the dialogue on equal terms does not erase her responsibility. On the contrary it increases it, because the therapist is responsible for the very reality she tends to build
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in the dialogue, and for her role within it. Maybe the responsibility of the therapist in the dialogical process is to keep open several different hypotheses, to avoid simple linear explanations, to introduce the idea that several possibilities exist in the telling of ones story, and to be open to discuss and accept the clients responses to this proposal.

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