The uses of formulation in cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were compared, by means of conversation analysis, using 53 audio-recorded sessions as data. Two formulation types were found in both approaches: highlighting formulations, which recycle the client's descriptions and recognize therapeutically dense material, and rephrasing formulations, which offer the therapist's version of the client's description and focus on subjective experiences. These formulations may be interactional bearers of common factors in psychotherapy. Two other formulation types were exclusive to one or another approach. Relocating formulations, found only in psychoanalysis, propose that the experiences in the client's narratives are connected to experiences at other times or places. Exaggerating formulations, found only in cognitive psychotherapy, exaggerate the client's talk by recasting it as something that is apparently implausible. The contrast between relocating and exaggerating formulations suggests that, despite recent theories in the two approaches being more compatible, interactional differences still exist between cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

The present article emphasizes the relational aspects of psychotherapy communication by considering the prosodic features of the therapist's talk in relation to the prosody of the client.

The relationship between a psychotherapist and a client involves a specific kind of epistemic asymmetry: in therapy sessions the talk mainly concerns the client's experience, which is unavailable, as such, to the therapist. This epistemic asymmetry is understood in different ways within different psychotherapeutic traditions. Drawing on a corpus of 70 audio-recorded sessions of cognitive psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and using the method of conversation analysis, the interactional practices of therapists for dealing with this epistemic asymmetry are investigated. Two types of epistemic practices were found to be employed by therapists while formulating and interpreting the client's inner experience. In the formulations, the therapists and clients co-described the client's experience, demonstrating that the client's inner experience was somewhat similarly available to both participants. In the interpretations, the therapists constructed an evidential foundation for the interpretation by summarising the client's talk and using the same descriptive terms as the client. Clients held therapists accountable for this epistemic work: if they failed to engage in such work, their right to know the client's inner experience was called into question.

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We draw on interaction-oriented focus group research and conversation analysis to study the conversation-analytic data session as a pedagogical institution. Drawing on focus group interviews among conversation-analytic experts and novices, we considered (1) the degree of sharedness of different normative orientations among the conversation analysts regarding the data session and (2) possible differences in how novice and expert conversation analysts orient, perceive and evaluate data-session normativity. We found both the experts and novices to engage in a delicate act of balancing between two normative ideals-that everyone should contribute to the joint analysis and that everyone who contributes to the joint analysis should be constructive. The experts displayed a strong consensus that all data-session participants' contributions should be treated equally-given that all of them are competent language users. The novices, then again, emphasized the different levels of experience between the data-session participants and sought for recognition of their own lower competence in relation to that of the experts. It thus seems that the collaborative, democratic practices, which are seen as empowering by the experts, invoke anxiety in the novices. Making this tension visible can enable the development of conversation-analytic data sessions from the pedagogical perspective.