Epistemologías · 1985

Social constructionism

Social constructionism shifts the centre of gravity from the individual mind towards the relational, discursive and historical processes through which people and communities produce shared meanings. It does not start from the idea that psychological problems are fixed internal entities that the therapist must discover, but from the view that many forms of suffering are organised, stabilised or transformed in conversations, narratives, diagnostic categories, institutions, relations of power and culturally available ways of naming experience. This framework does not deny that bodies, emotions, pain, bonds or material events exist; what it questions is whether their clinical meaning can be separated from the linguistic and social contexts in which they are interpreted. An experience such as anxiety, sadness, trauma, dependence or family conflict does not appear clinically as raw data, but as an experience already situated within stories, expectations, labels, relational positions and discourses about what is normal, pathological, desirable or possible. In psychotherapy, social constructionism grounds much of narrative, collaborative, conversational, postmodern and solution-focused therapy. These practices tend to understand therapy as a space for the co-construction of meaning, not as a technical operation in which an expert applies an objective truth about the patient from outside. The therapist functions more as an interlocutor, a facilitator of dialogue, a reflecting witness or a co-author of new discursive possibilities than as a neutral observer revealing a hidden structure of the mind. Its principal contribution to clinical practice is to make visible that problems are not only lived but also narrated, named, negotiated and socially sustained. Clinical change is therefore understood as the opening of new descriptions, new subject positions, new conversations and new forms of relationship that allow the person to stop being captured by dominant stories, deficit identities or rigid categories. The important nuance is that social constructionism must not be confused with a simple relativism according to which any account is worth as much as any other, or nothing has consistency outside language. Its rigorous clinical use requires attention both to discourses and to their concrete effects on people's lives: which possibilities they open, which they close, which relationships they legitimise, which identities they produce and which forms of agency they allow.