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.
This paper aims to shed light on the ways in which 'neutrality' is both produced and resisted by socially competent actors in family therapy sessions. It draws upon recent and previous papers in this journal (Stancombe and White, 1997;Stratton, 2003aStratton, , 2003b, which highlight the importance of blame in therapeutic encounters. When families come to therapy, individual members frequently deliver competing accounts about the family troubles and who is to blame for them. This produces particular challenges for the therapist. We examine the practices of therapists in managing accountability in the session and in their own discussions. Family therapists operate with a professional ethic of neutrality, or multi-partiality. This paper is concerned with the linguistic strategies used by therapists to deal with overtly blaming accounts, how these strategies are responded to by family members in talk-in-interaction and how therapists go about crafting accountability-neutral versions. We show that the social and moral context of family work makes the therapist's job of communicating multi-partiality precarious. In producing accountability-neutral versions of families' troubles, therapists are forced to make practical-moral evaluations of competing versions of events. We conclude by arguing for a more explicit engagement with the moral nature of therapeutic practice.
Over the last decade the therapeutic industry has begun to question the foundations for its own knowledge claims. Unable to retreat into logico-empiricism and naive realism because of its own internal critique of these philosophical positions, it has sought solace in hermeneutics and postfoundationalist epistemology. Through an examination of debates within psychotherapy process research, it is possible to chart the development of this linguistic turn. The end of the search for therapeutic certainties has certain repercussions which have, hitherto, been neglected by theorists and clinicians, whose desire to escape some of the constraints of scientism sits uneasily alongside an unshakeable commitment to therapeutic practices which are essentially normative.
En la última década, la actividad terapéutica ha empezado a cuestionarse los fundamentos de sus propias afirmaciones. Sin poder refugiarse en el empirismo lógico ni en el realismo ingenuo debido a su crítica intrínseca hacia estas posiciones filosóficas, ha intentado buscar una respuesta en las epistemologías hermenéutica y postfundacionalista. Mediante el análisis de los temas de debate de la investigación del proceso terapéutico, podremos trazar el desarrollo de las actuales tendencias lingüísticas. El fin de la era de la búsqueda de certidumbres en el ámbito de la terapia ha tenido ciertas consecuencias que, hasta la fecha, han sido ignoradas tanto por los clínicos como por los teóricos, cuya intención de huir de las restricciones del cientificismo resulta incompatible con un inquebrantable compromiso con las prácticas terapéuticas, que son esencialmente normativas.
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