Rewordings as links to collective knowledge: A microanalytic study of interventions in psychotherapy

Abstract

Based on a corpus of six short-term therapies (client-centered therapy, psychodynamic therapy) the article documents three extracts of therapeutical exchanges and analyses them from a qualitative linguistic perspective. In the analyses processes are identified by which the patient’s understanding of his/her biographical situation is addressed and incrementally changed. It is shown that the rewording of the patient’s experiences from a different perspective constitutes a vital element of such processes of perspective change. Whereas the patient describes his/her experience in words that render it unique and erratic, the therapist uses phrases and expressions that rename these experiences from a collective perspective. In this way, the patient’s situation is framed as comparable to situations that are societally known and understood. Thereby links to stocks of societal knowledge about the emergence of such situations are created, about its structure and – most importantly – about ways to deal with it.