Karl Tomm’s Internalized Other Interviewing: From Theory to Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last 40 years, the Canadian psychiatrist and family therapist Karl Tomm has been a key contributor to postmodern developments in family therapy (Collins & Tomm, 2009; Strong et al., 2008; Tomm, Hoyt, & Madigan, 2001). This dissertation traces the people, ideas, and practices that have influenced Tomm's approach, providing an in- depth examination of the method he developed for putting his ideas into practice: Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). A systemic, relational approach to the practice of postmodern family therapy uses language as a means to create change. Family therapists routinely use different types of questions to ask clients about other people in their lives. Direct, information-seeking questions privilege objectivity, whereas interpersonal perception questions privilege subjective assumptions and allow for new possibilities to arise. The IOI approach offers a third way to ask questions that "privilege subject-dependent assumptions and embodied knowledge" (K. Tomm, personal communication, August 15, 2019). By inviting clients to speak from their experience of the other, therapists gain entry to a broader base of knowledge.Grounded in social constructionism and bringforthism (Strong et al., 2008; Tomm, 1999, 2002, 2014b), IOI has remained relatively unrecognized and underutilized in clinical work. To date, the theoretical underpinnings and historical development of IOI have not been thoroughly delineated. This dissertation provides the necessary background information and detailed examples for therapists to put the practice in context.Archival information about case examples collected during and following the author's externship at the Calgary Family Therapy Centre in August 2019 have been interwoven throughout the manuscript. These case descriptions, along with Karl Tomm's reflective thoughts, are used to illustrate and illuminate the theory and practice of IOI, bringing to life Tomm's inimitable way of working systemically with individuals, couples, and families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".