Therapeutic Discourse

Abstract

Therapeutic discourse is the talk in interaction between clinician and client that aims to improve the mental health of a client. Therapeutic discourse can be conducted in a wide range of institutional settings, varying from primary-care medicine, to rehabilitation and social work. In psychotherapy, therapeutic discourse is the key activity, as the sole business of the psychotherapeutic encounter is to talk and interact in ways that improve the client's mental health. Early studies of therapeutic discourse Therapeutic discourse has been an interest of social scientific and linguistic research from as early as the 1950s. Qualitative interaction analysis of audio-or video-recorded psychotherapy sessions was started by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy (1961), who described in detail an audio recording of the first five minutes of an initial psychiatric interview. They paid particular attention to the implicit meanings conveyed by the lexical and prosodic choices of the participants. The major milestone was Labov and Fanshel's book Therapeutic Discourse (1977) in which they analyze a single, 15-minute long segment of psychotherapy interaction using speech act theory. In their analysis, Labov and Fanshel single out four basic types of actions: metalinguistic action (initiating, continuing, or ending an action), representation, request, and challenge. Through the examination of these actions, the authors address themes that are pertinent also in the clinical understanding of psychotherapy, such as emotion and repression. The early studies employed a major part of the concepts and tools of linguistic and social scientific interaction research. Therapeutic discourse has, however, also been studied in other disciplines. Psychotherapy process research is perhaps the most comprehensive research field for understanding therapeutic discourse. Psychotherapy process research Due to the centrality of language and interaction in psychotherapy, themes pertaining to therapeutic discourse are addressed not only in linguistic and social scientific research, but also in clinical and psychological research on psychotherapy. There is a rich research tradition on processes through which psychological change in the client occurs during

Mark Ravenhill’in Ghost Story Oyununda İyileştirici Söylem Üzerinden Düşünce Gücü Olgusu

“…Meryl, on the other side, is gradually portrayed as helpless in contrast with her first appearance onstage as the play proceeds. While Lisa gains strenght against her illness under favour of positive thinking through therapeutic discourse generating self-observation "which increases awareness of the original problems and allows an altered relationship to these problems" (Weiste & Peräkylä, 2015:3), Meryl seems to be incapable of commanding her mind. In very deed, Meryl initially comes up with strength and professional attitude towards Lisa who is in the pursuit of crossing the line between the healed and the healer to urge Meryl to share her own experiences of breast cancer.…”

Psychotherapy

“…However, in CA of psychotherapy, it has now become more customary to formulate research problems in somewhat more mixed language. Thus, researchers of psychotherapeutic interaction frame their studies in terms both of clinical theories and CA notions (for recent overviews, see Weiste and Peräkylä 2015;Peräkylä 2019). As pointed out by several researchers, psychotherapy aims at changing the client's experience -emotion, relationships or agency (Voutilainen et al 2018;Peräkylä 2019).…”