Reading Against the Lines: Resisting Foreclosure in Therapy Discourse

In this article, it is noted that poststructural ideas can be useful tools in fostering reflexivity and creativity for clinicians. By examining the process of meaning construction, clinicians can detach from repetitive interpretations of therapy discourse that lead to conversational closure. Four strategies for guiding a reading of family therapy interaction are presented: incitement to discourse, deconstruction, normativity, and the cultural grid of intelligibility. These strategies are used to describe examples of marital therapy discourse. By learning to read therapy as discourse, clinicians may critically examine how meaning is constructed and use that awareness to foster therapeutic conversations.     

Therapy with Refugee Families: What Is a “Good” Conversation?

This article addresses the question of what is a “good” conversation by analyzing “poor” conversations. During a project on family therapy with refugee families, we often experienced what we labeled as “poor” conversations. We present examples of a variety of such conversations, which we then analyze with reference to therapeutic maps and central concerns of the therapists. We describe four patterns of therapist/client relationships that emerged from this analysis. The main focus of our discussion is to clarify when “poor” conversations may be an important part of the therapeutic process, and when and how they should be avoided. We believe that the issues we raise are central to therapeutic work in general and not just to therapy with refugee families.     

The process of enabling change: a study of therapist interventions in family therapy

We describe the application of discursive analysis to the task of researching family therapy process. Through the analysis of a central theme in two family therapy treatments, we found that individual family members move to using a wider range of discourses on the central theme by the end of therapy. Using the example of one family's therapy sessions, we examine how the therapist contributes to the new meanings and views that emerge, and present our analysis of the therapists' interventions in relation to the 'production' of these alternative meanings. It is argued that discourse analysis can fruitfully be applied to family therapy process research and could contribute to theoretical concepts of change and therapeutic competence.     

Dilemmas in kinship care: negotiating entitlements in therapy

This paper considers how ideological dilemmas that arise in therapy can be analysed usefully for therapeutic practice. The focus is on the particular situation of kinship care families where family or friends are caring for children without birth parents being present. In the process of family members negotiating the entitlement to care and to be cared for, multiple possibilities about family constructions and authorities throw up many dilemmas for therapists and families. Based on the author's research study with kinship care families, a method for linking discourse theory and therapeutic practice through the use of discourse analysis and positioning theory is explored, with reference to the hierarchical method of the Co‐ordinated Management of Meaning model. The paper contends that a consideration of ideological dilemmas in conversation is a core part of any therapeutic encounter, which needs to be recognized and considered in order that those involved in therapy may reflect on several possible futures and so open up the space for future decision‐making.     

Talking about talking: Interpersonal process recall as an intersubjective approach to research

Research methods are often marked by inequalities between researcher and researched, maintained through dominant discourses that structure expectations of research. This study considers how therapeutic skills such as reflexivity can help to develop alternative discourses, raise awareness and challenge inequalities in research. An approach to the qualitative analysis of research interviews using interpersonal process recall (IPR) is outlined. By focusing attention on the dialogue and enabling researcher and research participant to review and explore their interaction reflexively, IPR offers an opportunity to understand interviews as intersubjective events. It thus facilitates the collaborative identification of processes and narratives as key moments for further analysis and increases awareness of the potential blurring of genres between therapeutic and research conversations. The contribution of IPR to an intersubjective lens and greater equality in research interviewing is discussed. Potential implications for both research and therapy practices are suggested.     

Language matters in counselling diversity

The paper presents a personal view of some issues around therapeutic conversations involving difference and minority experience. Language, discourse and mother-tongue are explored from different theoretical standpoints and considered alongside concepts of difference, otherness and the unvoiced. Intercultural counselling offers a framework for unpacking the meaning of decolonising practice in conversations with clients or counsellors from ethnic or other minorities undertaking counselling or supervision. I discuss possibilities for practice informed by existential and hermeneutic phenomenology, including gestalt therapy interventions to bring in the body alongside discourse, and phenomenological empathy as a non-colonising resource in working across difference and diversity.     

Patient‐focused research supported practices in an intensive family therapy unit

The aim of this study is to explain how families evaluate and describe the use of two measures, the session rating scale and the outcome rating scale, in order to monitor therapeutic work. This study is methodologically based on modifications of methodical hermeneutics and consensual qualitative research. The results confirm the feasibility of these scales although some difficulties were identified. The analysis of the family interviews identified four conversational processes: communicating, focusing, structuring and exploration. These arise through the application of the scales, indicating their usefulness as conversational tools. In general, it is suggested that all the measurements and tools applied can be seen as therapeutic tools that are especially useful for establishing conversations and strengthening collaboration between service users and therapists. This brings the practice of monitoring therapeutic work into close contact with postmodern‐oriented forms of therapy.     

Culturally sensitive therapy? Examining the practice of cross‐cultural family therapy

This article is drawn from a research project that examines cross‐cultural family therapy sessions in order to consider what constitutes culturally sensitive practice. A discourse analytic approach was adopted in the analysis of three sessions from two families where the family and the therapists originated from different ethnic backgrounds. This article is based around part of the research findings connected to one of the families, and focuses upon the ways in which ‘culture’ is talked about in therapy (the term ‘culture’ will be referred to in inverted commas in order to acknowledge its complexity as is emphasized in this article). This allows for an examination of the cultural assumptions that we hold as therapists, which are enacted in therapy with effects on all participants and upon the course of the therapy. The value of qualitative research methods in examining the cultural assumptions we bring to therapy is highlighted as one way of improving culturally sensitive therapeutic practice, especially with regard to therapist reflexivity.     

Tyranny and freedom: looking at ideas in the practice of family therapy

This article comments upon recent "second-order" family therapy concerns about the nature of the therapeutic relationship, and explores how ideas held by therapists may rule and restrict therapeutic conversations. Ideas are examined in the light of how adherence to them might open space (free) or close space (tyrannize) with respect to the therapeutic relationship. The authors propose a philosophical viewpoint, a methodology, and practical suggestions for therapists wishing to maintain a stance of relative freedom with respect to ideas in their work with clients.     

‘Othering’ and ‘selving’ in therapeutic dialogue

In this article we consider therapeutic conversations about suffering and sexual identity through an ethical and practical lens we refer to as ‘othering’ and ‘selving’. The ethical lens is shaped by recent developments in discursive theory and approaches to therapy. Our practical lens draws from research by discourse analysts showing how conversational practices feature in consequential ways in delicate discussions such as those about suffering and sexual identity. After helping readers understand these lenses we then use them in examining actual discussions about identity and suffering. We conclude with some general ideas and reflective questions for therapists wishing to extend these kinds of sensitivities and conversational practices in their work with clients.     

Notes on the Tenacity of Therapeutic Presuppositions in Process Research: Examining the Artfulness of Blamings in Family Therapy

In their recent contribution to the Journal of Family Therapy , Frosh et al . apply discourse analytic methods to the study of 'process' in family therapy. While we welcome this contribution, we suggest that the authors' reading of the data has been affected by a number of fundamental presuppositions, which have led them to neglect the skilful rhetorical work taking place in the session. In this paper, we have undertaken an alternative analysis of the data, examining its rhetorical features and suspending judgement on the efficacy of the therapeutic project and on the truth status of statements made by participants in the session. While acknowledging that our microanalytic method has some shortcomings, we contend that attention to the situated and strategic nature of 'therapy talk' has exposed the primacy of notions of responsibility and blame in family work, and has shown how these issues are artfully negotiated by therapist and family in the cut and thrust of the therapeutic interview.     

Eliciting children's thinking in families and family therapy.

In this article, I introduce a way of talking between a therapist and children, which aims to be more adaptive to the family therapy context than the modes of communication with children often reported by individual psychotherapists. Although the recent increase in articles concerned with the role of children in family therapy is welcomed, I suggest that the common recommendation of the use of "play" and nonverbal methods of communication with young children can at times introduce its own constraints on a child's thinking. A method of engagement in "dialectical" conversations with children is described, and illustrated with verbatim case examples. It is argued that this offers one route to a discourse commonly used between children, and one that acknowledges their capacity to think.     

Gendered Patterns of Interaction: A Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Couple Therapy

In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in attention to gender and gender-based inequalities in family therapy. Despite this, there is a dearth of empirical work that examines how gendered inequalities intersecting with other axes of privilege/oppression are maintained within families, including in the therapeutic context. In this study, we used Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine how gendered power is produced and reproduced circularly or through recurrent patterns of interaction in couple therapy. We identified gendered discourses and assumptions informing partners’ constructions of their gendered selves and relationships. We highlight the complexity and intersectionality of gendered subjectivities and relations in contemporary Canadian couples involved in heterosexual relationships. Although women in this study contest their oppression and exhibit agency to negotiate who they are in general and in relation to men, they simultaneously continue to occupy subordinate positions in a gender order that is culturally and interactionally allocated to them. We discuss implications for family therapy practice.     

‘The experiencing of experience’: a Pragmatic reassessment of Rogerian Phenomenology

This paper draws on a study that asked twenty family users about their first session of family therapy. Analyses of the interviews indicated that families entered therapy with a pre-existent knowledge about therapy, which did not always chime with those of professionals and which positioned speakers in ways which governed their expectations and perceptions of therapy. This paper, therefore, is concerned with the acquisition and deployment of knowledge: specifically, the knowledge involved in being a user of family therapy. Three key discourses were identified through this analysis: medical, counselling and consumerist. We aim to illustrate how these discourses served as a resource for members of the family in constructing therapists, therapy and themselves in relation to their experience. The examination of the rhetorical, ideological and practical effects of the positions chosen and the objects constructed, in terms of how speakers wanted to present themselves, with what enhanced or diminished status as patients, shows users actively engaging with the power of therapeutic institutions. Users’ accounts suggest that while most speakers felt anxious about the prospect of therapy, there were clear differences in overall satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the experience according to the synchrony between speakers’ construction of the therapist, and themselves as client/patients. Those who seemed to take a traditional view of therapy within a medical discourse valued therapists who offered diagnosis and a cure; those who sought and experienced a counselling relationship with the therapist found their experience to be constructive in terms of enhanced self-knowledge. We believe that the research findings discussed in this paper have implications for family therapists in accommodating to parental and child positions to maximise the effectiveness of therapy and so minimise drop-out.     

The complaining client and the troubled therapist: a discursive investigation of family therapy

In this paper I examine two important issues for family therapy research. I attend to the concept of complaints, highlighting the conversational structure they take in a family therapy setting. I do this by outlining how clients construct their complaints and examining how the family therapist receives them. Data is taken from a corpus containing four different families and two different therapists, and is subjected to discursive analysis in order to provide a rich analysis of not just what is happening in the talk but how it is happening. I conclude that complaints are not received as useful to the therapeutic process, despite their constructed importance to the client, and therefore there are wider implications for therapy and professionals more generally, particularly implications for multi-agency communication.     

The Primacy of Discourse in the Study of Gender in Family Therapy

Family therapists and scholars increasingly adopt poststructural and postmodern conceptions of social reality, challenging the notion of stable, universal dynamics within family members and families and favoring a view of reality as produced through social interaction. In the study of gender and diversity, many envision differences as social constructed rather than as “residing” in people or groups. There is a growing interest in discourse or people's everyday use of language and how it may reflect and advance interests of dominant groups in a society. Despite this shift from structures to discourse, therapists struggle to locate the dynamics of power in concrete actions and interactions. By leaving undisturbed the social processes through which gendered and other subjectivities and relations of power are produced, therapists may inadvertently become complicit in the very dynamics of power they seek to undermine. In this article, we argue that discourse analysis can help family therapy scholars and practitioners clarify the link between language and power. We present published examples of discourse analytic studies of gender and sexism and examine the relevance of these ideas for family therapy practice and research.     

Therapy talk and therapeutic conversations: the formation of pastoral counselors

The article demonstrates a process analysis for therapeutic conversations, highlighting four styles of therapeutic communication and its relational patterns, and illustrates the use of two educational tools in learning the languages of therapy that shape therapeutic conversations.