The CauseHealth Series: Chapter 11 - Reflections on the Clinician’s Role in the Clinical Encounter with Dr Karin Mohn Engebretsen

Welcome to another episode on The Words Matter Podcast, I’m Oliver Thomson.

So on this episode of the CauseHealth Series, I’m speaking with Dr Karin Mohn Engebretsen about her Chapter 11 of the CauseHealth Book, titled “Reflections on the Clinician’s Role in the Clinical Encounter”. Karin is a Gestalt Psychotherapist, working in private clinical practice in Oslo, Norway.

Her doctoral research (see here) was on phenomenology and medically unexplained symptoms, with particular focus on burnout. She has Published a series of research papers from her PhD studies, many of which are open access (see here, here and here).

 So in this episode we talk about:

• Her journey into Gestalt psychotherapy and the congruence of her clinical role with dispositionalism.
• Burnout, and how it been treated in a reductionist way, with the attempt to reduce it to depression.
• Her experience interviewing participants in her PhD studies, who were experiencing burnout and how they felt about such a simple reduction of their situation.
• Her experience of tensions working in the tension between different paradigms/methods (positivism, constructivism, phenomenological).
• How she sees any therapeutic process as a function of the relationship between the interacting therapist, client and their common field as a whole.
• The important role clinicians have in the the clinical encounter, and the zone of intersubjectivity where meaning and causal stories are constructed
• And finally, Karin has some suggestions for those of us who are not psychotherapists, but would like to adopt a more embodied-relational understanding and approach to their clinical practice.

So this was really enjoyable discussion, with someone who has integrated dispositionalist theory with existing research and practice theories, namely existential phenomenology and constructivism.

This episode offer a real insight into the utility and compatibility of causal dispositionalism for person-centred clinical practice for all forms of healthcare, not just psychotherapy.

So I bring you Dr Karin Mohn Engebretsen

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