Interactional Practices of Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is done through interaction between the therapist and the client. Obviously, the ways in which psychotherapists interact with their clients are very much informed by the psychotherapeutic schools that the therapists represent. On the other hand — like interaction in any institutional context — also, psychotherapy, in its various forms, is bound in general norms of conversation, for example regarding turn-taking or general preference for agreement (see Sidnell & Stivers, 2012). Based on conversation analytical (CA) research, this chapter discusses relations between the interactional side of psychotherapy and clinical theories concerning psychotherapeutic work. Because CA is independent from any specific clinical theories of psychotherapy, its methodic tools make it possible to investigate how psychotherapy is done through the ‘generic’ means of social interaction. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.