Therapy As Discourse

This book addresses the premise that therapy can be understood, practiced, and researched as a discursive activity. Using varied forms of discourse analysis, it examines the cultural, institutional, and face-to-face communications that shape, and occur within, therapies that are discursively understood and practiced. By first providing an overview of commonalities across discursive therapies and research approaches, the authors discursively examine general aspects of therapy. Topics explored include subjectivity, psychological terms, institutional influences, therapeutic relationships, therapists’ ways of talking and questioning, discursive ethics, and assessment of therapeutic processes and outcomes. This book offers a macro-analysis of the conversational practices of a discursively informed approach to therapy; as well as a micro-analysis of the ways in which language shapes and is used in a discursively informed approach to therapy. This book will interest practitioners seeking to better understand therapy as a discursive process, and discourse analysts wanting to understand therapy as discursive therapists might practice it.

This collection of original papers by scholars who closely analyze the talk of the clinic features studies that were conceived with the aim of contributing to clinical practitioners' insight about how their talk works. No previous communication text has attempted to take such a practitioner-sensitive posture with its research presentations. Each chapter focuses on one or more performances that clinical practitioners -- in consort with their clients or colleagues -- must achieve with some regularity. These speech acts are consequential for effective practice and sometimes present themselves as problematic. Rather than calling for research to be simplified or reoriented in order for practitioners to understand it, these authors interpret state-of-the-art descriptive analysis for its practical import for clinicians. Each contributor delves deeply into clinical practice and its wisdom; therefore, each is positioned to identify alternative clinical practices and techniques and to appreciate practitioners' means of performing effectively. When reflective practitioners encounter these new pieces of work, productive alterations in how their work is done can be stimulated. By reading this work, reflective practitioners will now have new ways of considering their talk and new possibilities for speaking effectively. The volume is uniquely constructed so as to engage in dialogue with these reflective practitioners as they struggle to articulate their work. A practical wisdom-as-research trend has recently emerged in the clinical fields stimulating these practitioners to explore new and more informative ways -- communication and literary theory, ethnography, and discourse analysis -- to express what they do in clinics and hospitals. With the studies presented in this book, the editors build upon this dialectical process between practitioner and researcher, thus helping this productive conversation to continue.

Social Justice and Counseling represents the intersection between therapy, counseling, and social justice. The international roster of contributing researchers and practitioners demonstrate how social justice unfolds, utterance by utterance, in conversations that attend to social inequities, power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and more. Beginning with a critical interrogation of the concept of social justice itself, subsequent sections cover training and supervising from a social justice perspective, accessing local knowledge to privilege client voices, justice and gender, and anti-pathologizing and the politics of practice. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions for readers to engage experientially in what authors have offered. Students and practitioners alike will benefit from the postmodern, multicultural perspectives that underline each chapter.

Based on the complete transcripts from a marital therapy session, this analysis examines the constructivistic nature of conversation, rhetorical devices used in pursuit of a therapeutic agenda, and dialogue as a systemic process. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This collection of original papers by scholars who closely analyze the talk of the clinic features studies that were conceived with the aim of contributing to clinical practitioners' insight about how their talk works. No previous communication text has attempted to take such a practitioner-sensitive posture with its research presentations. Each chapter focuses on one or more performances that clinical practitioners -- in consort with their clients or colleagues -- must achieve with some regularity. These speech acts are consequential for effective practice and sometimes present themselves as problematic. Rather than calling for research to be simplified or reoriented in order for practitioners to understand it, these authors interpret state-of-the-art descriptive analysis for its practical import for clinicians. Each contributor delves deeply into clinical practice and its wisdom; therefore, each is positioned to identify alternative clinical practices and techniques and to appreciate practitioners' means of performing effectively. When reflective practitioners encounter these new pieces of work, productive alterations in how their work is done can be stimulated. By reading this work, reflective practitioners will now have new ways of considering their talk and new possibilities for speaking effectively. The volume is uniquely constructed so as to engage in dialogue with these reflective practitioners as they struggle to articulate their work. A practical wisdom-as-research trend has recently emerged in the clinical fields stimulating these practitioners to explore new and more informative ways -- communication and literary theory, ethnography, and discourse analysis -- to express what they do in clinics and hospitals. With the studies presented in this book, the editors build upon this dialectical process between practitioner and researcher, thus helping this productive conversation to continue.

For an endeavour that is largely based on conversation it may seem obvious to suggest that psychotherapy is discursive. After all, therapists and clients primarily use talk, or forms of discourse, to accomplish therapeutic aims. However, talk or discourse has usually been seen as secondary to the actual business of therapy - a necessary conduit for exhanging information between therapist and client, but seldom more. Psychotherapy primarily developed by mapping particular experiential domains in ways responsive to human intervention. Only recently though has the role that discourse plays been recognized as a focus in itself for analysis and intervention. Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice presents an overview of discursive perspectives in therapy, along with an account of their conceptual underpinnings. The book starts by setting out the case for a discursive and relational approach to therapy by justaposing it to the tradition that that leads to the diagnostic approach of the DSM-V and medical psychiatry. It then presents a thorough review of a range of innovative discursive methods, each presented by an authority in their respective area. The book shows how discursive therapies can help people construct a better sense of their world, and move beyond the constraints caused by the cultural preconceptions, opinions, and values the client has about the world. The book makes a unique contribution to the philosophy and psychiatry literature in examining both the philosophical bases of discursive therapy, whilst also showing how discursive perspectives can be applied in real therapeutic situations. The book will be of great value and interest to psychotherapists and psychiatrists wishing to understand, explore, and apply these innovative techniques.

Psychoanalysis, Gestault therapy, object relations, ego therapy, family therapy--all treat human disorders by therapeutic discourse. In this thought-provoking book, Tullio Maranhao examines the rhetoric of therapeutic discourse, focusing on psychoanalysis and family therapy and using samples of Socratic dialogue, as he addresses the critical question, "What is is that cures?" Are these sciences of the psyche or rhetorics of communication? Since every school of therapy that bases treatment on verbal actions can claim a certain degree of success in "treating" its patients, one cannot proclaim with conviction one school to the exclusion of all others. There are, Maranhao demonstrates, common rhetorical elements among all such therapies. He examines both psychoanalysis and family therapy, each in its own theory, in its repertoire of rhetorical maneuvers, and in the way it uses the power hierarchy of the therapeutic interaction. Maranhao begins by analyzing each discourse as a relationship among knowledge, power, and rhetoric. He then progresses to a series of comparative analyses, eventually demonstrating the fundamental unity of the two discourses and, more broadly, illuminating the very nature of discourse in Western society. The last part of the book ties together the complex argument developed earlier and includes an extremely provocative discussion on how communicative consensus is achieved through fundamental operations labeled as comprehension, acceptance, and approbation. The result is a stimulating and challenging examination of two of the most distinct traditions of therapeutic practice, their theories, their rhetorical modes of practice, and their uses of the power hierarchy in therapeutic interaction. Maranhao's work will be of interest and value not only to students, scholars, and practitioners in the field, but to all who have taken part therapeutic discourse of any kind and wish to gain a better understanding of the sometimes subtle processes involved in such therapy.