The Linguistic Therapy of Evaluation: A Perspective on Language in Psychotherapy

Abstract

The clinical procedure presented here could be considered a type of cognitive psychotherapy which has the main aim of producing an evaluational change through linguistic means. The linguistic therapy of evaluation is based upon the theory of general semantics and is based on a theory which connects emotional problems, such as anxiety and depression, with language use. These elements are described along with some other important issues, such as how language is understood from the general semantics perspective, the four main therapeutic elements of the therapy, the structure of the clinical procedure and two of its two main techniques: the orders of abstraction and the extensional devices. The paper will conclude by introducing some of the main differences and similarities between the linguistic therapy of evaluation and two of the main cognitive perspectives, those termed rationalist and those termed constructivist.