The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

COLLABORATIVE LANGUAGE SYSTEMS: HARLENE ANDERSON

Harlene Anderson, with the late Harold Goolishian, has developed a dialogic process for therapy that she has called either a collaborative language systems approach (Anderson, 1993, 1995) or just a collaborative approach (Anderson, 1997). She describes this postmodern approach to therapy as “a language system and a linguistic event in which people are engaged in a collaborative relationship and conversation—a mutual endeavor toward possibility” (Anderson, 1997, p. 2). The conceptual underpinnings of her work stem from “the postmodern premises of contemporary hermeneutics and social constructionism, with its emphasis on the interrelated relational nature of knowledge and the notion of self as linguistically ...