Patients and psychotherapists using concessive counter‐argumentation: Co‐constructing new framings

Abstract

Shifting point of view and imagining alternative scenarios can be considered crucial goals of every therapeutic path. Reframing is aimed at stimulating other hypotheses and new viewpoints of the same situation and at adding complexity to one's own and to the others' world images. An interesting aspect to be investigated is the linguistic mechanisms through which this reframing can be enacted. Our work has an interdisciplinary focus and can be staged in between theories and techniques of psychotherapy on the one side and argumentation theory on the other side. The aim of this contribution was to explore the potential role that concessive counter‐argumentation plays in amplifying and redefining patients' framing. Our study consists of an in‐depth single‐case analysis based on two psychotherapeutic sessions. The analysis comprises different steps: first, we identified the concessive sentences in the transcriptions of the psychotherapy sessions and we considered them as counter‐argumentations; second, we identified the two parts of the concessive counter‐argumentations; third, we identified the inferences that could be drawn from these two parts; and finally, we reconstructed the contextual framing that was enacted and endorsed by both the patient and the therapist. The findings show that both the therapist's and the patient's concessive counter‐argumentations help in detecting key passages of sessions that open new, previously unimagined scenarios, thereby also contributing to clinical theory.

Social construction of the image of the psychologist and of the patient: the role of implicit premises

“…Such a stereotype has the negative consequence of removing responsibility from the patient, who at the same time loses a high degree of freedom and agency in his life. On the contrary, in psychotherapy, the patient's disclosure has a real healing power and has a construens function: the patient selects given pieces of information that are then deployed by the therapist to reframe the patient's narration, so that the patient can re-read reality in a more useful way for them in a given moment (Luciani and Convertini, 2023 ).…”

“…In conclusion, we believe that contextual implicit premises are fundamental in shedding light on how stereotypes (and stigma) are built according to how people see the world and themselves. It is the perfect idea (Cecchin and Apolloni, 2003 ) of how the world should be that constructs prisons around people's lives: “As therapists we should open up a space of freedom from tangles of maladaptive habits” (Luciani, 2021 , p. 130).…”