Postmodern models of therapy stress the participation of the clinician in a nonhierarchical, non-objectifying role, and highlight the therapist's embeddedness in the same processes of social construction as are the individual and the family. While much theory has been published in recent years, the actual conduct of a therapy session derived from the premises of postmodernism remains unclear. We investigated how a postmodern therapist manages talk in an actual session. We used textual analysis to examine a couples therapy session conducted by a prominent narrative therapist. Analysis of the talk led to descriptions of the couple's and therapist's agenda, and their interaction. The therapist's agenda is described in terms of "decentering" both the local unfolding narrative and its embeddedness in larger cultural stories. Five conversational practices: matching/self-disclosure, reciprocal editing, turn management to deobjectify, expansion questions, and reversals are examined. These practices inform the deployment of a decentering agenda in this specific text.

This study examined cross-cultural differences in the relationship of selfdifferentiation with self-esteem and depressed mood, two indices of psychological well-being. Participants were 427 Korean and 375 European American college students. The main findings were that the levels of all components of self-differentiation were greater for European Americans than for Koreans; self-differentiation was associated with psychological well-being more strongly in American samples than in Korean counterparts; and ''I position'' was the most powerful predictor on selfesteem in both groups. Results suggest that differentiation is a meaningful construct for understanding psychological adjustment of college students in collectivistic Korean society.

This study examined the degree to which self-differentiation as related to family functioning is valued differently by Korean and European-American university students. The main findings confirm that the level of family functioning reported by European Americans is greater than for their Korean counterpart; family functioning is associated with differentiation measures (total score, emotional reactivity, and emotional cutoff) to a different extent across the two groups; and controlling for the effect of family functioning, the added contribution of a country variable explained further variance in selfdifferentiation. The importance of addressing the issue of similarities and differences between cultures in the assessment and treatment of individuals with problems related to their families of origin is discussed.

This study is a qualitative exploration of the therapeutic process occurring in a solution‐focused therapy session. A complete one‐session solution‐focused marital therapy case conducted by Bill O'Hanlon was analyzed using conversation analysis. Conversation analysis is a method of data analysis that describes how language is used to elicit new constructions of reality; it offers descriptive categories useful to both clinicians and researchers. Through intense examination of the communications of the therapist, wife, and husband, nine categories of linguistic strategies used by O'Hanlon in his pursuit of solution‐focused conversation are developed. Implications of these strategies for the field are discussed.

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An intervention model for couples reporting both relationship and financial stress was developed and evaluated. The model utilized co-therapy teams of marriage and family therapists and financial planners who employed a five-session treatment approach in working with 12 couples. Findings demonstrated numerous benefits of this collaborative model. A recommendation was made that academic programs and professionals in MFT and Financial Planning develop similar interdisciplinary collaborative efforts.

This brief report presents some preliminary results of part of a study currently being conducted (Gale, 1992, May). The study is a qualitative analysis of a couple's and therapist's perspective of meaningful moments in therapy using Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) (Elliott, 1986). The methodology of this study involved the collaborators (aka: subjects) in a manner that was self-reflexive and recursive (see Steier, in press). The impact of the study was such that the research interviews themselves were reported to have greater therapeutic impact than the therapy. Following eight sessions of marital therapy, the couple reported that therapy was not helpful, and they were together only because of the children. Following the second IPR interview, which was post-therapy, the couple reported that the interview was very useful and therapeutic. This seemed to occur, in part, from three different factors. These factors include: the relationship of the couple to the researcher; the contextualization of the research talk; and clarifying procedures used by the interviewer.