Socratic dialogue
a process of structured inquiry and discussion between two or more people to explore the concepts and values that underlie their everyday activities and judgments. In some psychotherapies, it is a technique in which the therapist poses strategic questions designed to clarify the client’s core beliefs and feelings and, in the case of cognitive therapy, to enable the client to discover the distortions in his or her habitual interpretation of a given situation. In psychotherapy, it is also known as the Socratic-therapeutic method.