Therapy as Discourse: Practice and Research

This book addresses the premise that therapy can be understood, practiced, and researched as a discursive activity. Using varied forms of discourse analysis, it examines the cultural, institutional, and face-to-face communications that shape, and occur within, therapies that are discursively understood and practiced. By first providing an overview of commonalities across discursive therapies and research approaches, the authors discursively examine general aspects of therapy. Topics explored include subjectivity, psychological terms, institutional influences, therapeutic relationships, therapists’ ways of talking and questioning, discursive ethics, and assessment of therapeutic processes and outcomes. This book offers a macro-analysis of the conversational practices of a discursively informed approach to therapy; as well as a micro-analysis of the ways in which language shapes and is used in a discursively informed approach to therapy. This book will interest practitioners seeking to better understand therapy as a discursive process, and discourse analysts wanting to understand therapy as discursive therapists might practice it.

About the Author

Olga Smoliak is an Associate Professor in Couple and Family Therapy at the University of Guelph, Canada. She uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to investigate how psychological matters are constituted discursively. Olga has studied interactional methods used in therapy to give advice, collaborate, accomplish therapeutic tasks, and negotiate responsibility for blameworthy conduct. Tom Strong is a Professor, couple and family therapist, and counsellor-educator at the University of Calgary, Canada. Tom researches and writes on the collaborative, critically-informed and practical potentials of discursive approaches to psychotherapy.