The objective of this article is to describe some contributions of social constructionism and social poesis in the description of group psychotherapy and its scientific investigation. Social constructionism is an alternative form of intelligibility in science, which focuses on the comprehension of the way people make sense of the world and of themselves in their discursive practices. Concurrent with this perspective, social poesis can be described as a research practice that is useful in investigating the conversational processes, emphasizing the centrality of the researcher in the construction of meanings about its object of study. In this article, we aim to describe how these perspectives can sustain a systematic research practice of group psychotherapy. Thus, we describe some methodological steps developed in a study about a group in a mental health setting, showing how they helped us to comprehend the conversational process through which the group was constructed as a therapeutic resource.
social constructionism; group psychotherapy; methodology