Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition

Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition is a work by William R. Miller (2012).

Core claims

• Motivational Interviewing’s core mechanism — evoking the client’s own language of change rather than prescribing it — constitutes an operational polytheism of the psyche, honoring the multiple, competing motivational voices within a person rather than enforcing a single therapeutic narrative.
• Miller and Rollnick’s concept of “sustain talk” as a legitimate expression of the psyche, not mere resistance to be overcome, represents one of the few clinical frameworks in mainstream psychology that treats ambivalence as structurally necessary rather than pathological — a position that converges, from entirely different premises, with depth psychology’s refusal to pathologize the fragmented self.
• The book’s most radical contribution is not its technique but its epistemology: MI relocates therapeutic authority from the clinician’s diagnostic framework to the client’s own emerging narrative, effectively dissolving the monotheistic expert-stance that dominates behavioral health and replacing it with a relational field where multiple truths coexist.

Related questions

• How does Miller and Rollnick’s concept of the “righting reflex” compare to Hillman’s critique of the “strong ego” and monotheistic clinical consciousness in Re-Visioning Psychology? Are they identifying the same structural pathology from different disciplinary positions?
• Can MI’s empirical finding that sustain talk increases when clinicians argue against it be read through David Miller’s account in The New Polytheism of what happens when polytheistic psychic realities are forced into monotheistic frameworks — and what would such a reading reveal about the mechanism of therapeutic resistance?
• How does the evocative stance in Motivational Interviewing relate to Jung’s concept of the transcendent function, particularly as elaborated in Hillman’s Senex & Puer — does MI’s refusal to side with either pole of ambivalence constitute a secular enactment of holding the tension of opposites?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-clinic/miller-motivational-interviewing-helping/

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