Free Care Essays Therapeutic Practice Of The Therapist...

Therapeutic Practice in HBO’s â€Å"In Treatment† In the HBO series â€Å"In Treatment†, the therapist Paul’s treatment of his patient Sophie evolves over several episodes. Over the course of the four episodes in discussion in this paper, Sophie, an elite gymnast deals with the aftermath of a suicide attempt and her complicated relationship to her parents, her body and her sexuality. Paul’s approach to Sophie’s treatment is constructivist. He relies on a postmodernist framework to help Sophie evaluate and reframe the story that she has been telling herself about her parents. In episode 28, Sophie happily munches on a slice of pizza. Her enjoyment of the pizza comes to an end when Paul remarks that he is happy to see her eating with gusto. This quickly ends her enjoyment of the pizza and she becomes very closed off to him. Sophie goes on to tell a story of how the word reminds her of a girlfriend of her father’s, an Italian model who also admired the gusto with which Sophie ate. Sophie’s self-consciousness and obsession with her weight and her overall physical appearance are revealed in this moment and it becomes clear that Sophie’s difficulty lies in the way that she has constructed her sense of herself in relation to the cultural belief about beauty and perfection that she has received from her father and his model girlfriends. Later in the same episode, Paul pulls down one of Sophie’s father’s books of photographs. His approach is to use narrative therapy to help Sophie narrate her