By analyzing session exchanges and questionnaires administered to family therapy clients, this article examines questioning as conversational practice grounded in institutional goals that are therapist-directed and therapist-conceived. In their manifestation in talk and text, therapeutic questions function to replace client accounts with the nosological accounts of institutional psychiatry. The analysis illuminates three ways in which questioning works in the session and then locates these in therapy's professional and institutional logic. A critical reflection on psychotherapy's questioning practices in a social context concludes the article.
Combining talk and textual data from a family therapy clinic, this paper examines six discourse strategies therapists employ during first sessions of therapy to reframe and ultimately substitute client accounts with a therapeutic version of the problem. These are: metalinguistic actions; institutional positioning; speaking for the client; speaking through the client; re-authoring emotions; invoking a notion of 'communication' as a technological skill. Arguing that asymmetry is both a resource and a co-participatory dynamic of therapeutic interaction, I analyse therapeutic asymmetry in terms of unequal accountability between therapist and client and tie session strategies to a larger institutional praxis of un-authorization of client accounts and ways of accounting. Thus, while clients may go to therapy expecting to be heard on their own, first-person terms, therapy works by exchanging those terms in favour of an expert, third person vocabulary of institutional accounting that clients cannot claim. I define therapeutic authority as the ability of the therapist, but not the client, to strategically intervene in the session in order to put forth versions of problems for which the therapist is not directly accountable, and to which the client has no access.
In this discourse analysis of how memory acquires and is acquired in interview exchanges, we investigate remembering as a category-bound activity, both a tensional and collaborative process of moral ratification of `survivor' as membership category. We propose the term re-membering to mean piecing together possible versions of survivor experiences in talk; these versions, offered by respondents and elicited by interviewers through questioning strategies, are epistemic claims to acquire the Holocaust as memory, or institutional History . We explore the accounting dynamic of interviewer and respondent, the relationship of ownership between survivors and memory, and the duties and moral obligations of the category `Holocaust survivor' that can be shown through the interviews of survivors and their adult daughters.
To anticipate and forestall disasters is to understand regularities in the ways small events can combine to have disproportionately large effects." Taking Weick's observation to heart, we examine teleconference calls between Louisiana local and state officials and federal officials as Hurricane Katrina gathered momentum by applying action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA). AIDA highlights the linkages between communication dilemmas and communication practices. We analyze "reporting" as a metacommunicative speech act that implicated pragmatic communication dilemmas of how to act in the face of emerging disaster. We explicate how, during the Hurricane Katrina teleconferences, "reporting" shaped and constrained the formulation of problems and responses by creating a structure that facilitated order while inhibiting the identification of and "talking through" of confusion points, and the communicative sharing of local resources. As such, we identify how sensemaking is interconnected with interactional framing. Reporting thus constituted a "small event" that occurred with "regularity" during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.