Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy: Identifying Transformative Sequences

Abstract

The starting point of conversation analytical research on psychotherapy was in Kathy Davis's work on problem reformulations in the mid 1980s. Since then there has been a growing body of analysis of psychotherapy, based on the close, sequential relations between adjacent utterances. Through examples drawn from CA studies on psychotherapy in the past decade, this review shows that sequential relations between utterances enable a process of transformation of experience. This process pertains to referents, emotion, and momentary relations between the therapist and the client. The utterance-by-utterance transformation contributes to the process of change in more macroscopic time, spanning the continuum of psychotherapeutic sessions. The recent developments of CA research on psychiatric consultants will also be discussed. Data are in Finnish and English.

Managing Distress Over Time in Psychotherapy: Guiding the Client in and Through Intense Emotional Work

“…Furthermore, accompanying visible conduct, such as shoulder and chest heaving were also noted during sighing where they occurred (Hoey, 2014;Hepburn and Bolden, 2017). Sequence organization was examined with respect to three interconnected sequential slots that typically occur in psychotherapy interaction (Peräkylä, 2019): an initiating action, followed by a responding action and ending with a third position action that closes the exchange. In terms of distress display sequences, initiating actions involved a display or report of distress, followed by the therapist's response to the emergence of client distress and, finally, the next position in which the client ratifies or rejects the therapist's action.…”

How to investigate the local and global change potential of questioning sequences in executive coaching? A call for interdisciplinary research

“…Knowledge asymmetry emerges on the level of the concrete (coaching) conversation in diff ering epistemic authorities, rights and obligations of the participants (Heritage 2018, Raymond 2018. Linguistic coaching process research looks into the varying degrees of thematic and interactive control over the coaching conversation via agenda setting and interaction orchestration in general and, more concretely, via applying discursive practices such as questions with specifi c communicative intentions (Spranz-Fogasy 1992, Tiittula 2001, Mönnich 2004) that contribute to the local, utterance-by-utterance process of change (Peräkylä 2019). How coaches locally dominate and guide the conversations is molded by their professional agenda that underlies how the goal of the interaction (i.e.…”

“…To begin closing the aforementioned research gap, we advocate to avoid a decontextualizing, monological perspective on questions. Instead, we suggest Conversation Analysis as a fruitful methodological framework to investigate both the natural occurrence of questioning practices in their sequential set-up of 'question -response -follow-up' within a coaching conversation and the local change potential of questioning sequences entailed in such sequentiality (Peräkylä 2019). Regarding questions as part of turnby-turn sequences is concurrently a fi rst step to bring them into relation with larger units such as phases and the entire coaching process, which is the underlying objective of the current endeavor.…”

What Do People Do to Sustain a Conversation: Analysis of the Features and the Speech Function of a Casual Conversation

“…Buchholz and Kächele (2017) found CA was beneficial for psychotherapeutic talk during psychotherapy. CA is able to describe moment-by-moment evolution of talk that is organized as sequences of actions (Peräkylä, 2019) and therefore can be a powerful tool for psychoanalytic practice and psychotherapy research (Buchholz & Kächele, 2013).…”