Signs and Voices in Psychotherapy

Signs (e.g., words, gestures, tokens, pictures) point to something besides themselves and are observable. Using signs, events can reproduce themselves (in part) across time and space. Signs change meaning each time they are used, but they also accumulate meanings from each use. Voices are active subdivisions (or collectivities) of people, internalized agents representing people, and events formed from traces of previous experience. People can be understood as communities of voices. Most theoretical approaches to psychotherapy recognize some forms of multivoicedness. Multiple voices may represent depth of resources and flexibility or fragmentation and dissociation, depending on the strength of the meaning bridges between the voices, which are constructed of signs. This article reviews research findings and problems that led me to my interest in signs and voices, and gives psychotherapy case examples of sign-mediated assimilation of problematic voices into the client’s community of voices.