Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
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Fabrizio Bercelli
Abstract
This paper deals with clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy. Using the method of conversation analysis, we focus on actions and tasks accomplished through clients' narratives. We identify, within the overall structural organization of therapeutic talk in our corpus, two different sequential placements of clients' narratives and describe some of their distinctive features. When they are placed within an inquiry phase of the session and are solicited by therapists' questions, the clients' narratives mainly provide information for therapists in the service of their inquiring agenda. When placed within an elaboration phase of the session, personal narratives are regularly volunteered by clients and produced as responses to therapists' reinterpretations, i.e., statements working up clients' circumstances as previously described by clients. In this latter placement, they mainly offer further evidence relevant to the therapists' reinterpretations, and thus show how clients understand therapists' reinterpretations and what they make of them. The import of these findings, for both an explication of therapeutic techniques and a better understanding of the therapeutic process, is also discussed.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Editorial: Narrative practice, competence, and understanding
- Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices
- Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
- Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
- ‘From where we're sat …’: Negotiating narrative transformation through interaction in police interviews with suspects
- Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
- Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis
- Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
- Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative
- Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
Articles in the same Issue
- Editorial: Narrative practice, competence, and understanding
- Introduction: Narrative analysis in the shift from texts to practices
- Different place, different action: Clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy
- Narratives as a resource to manage disagreement: Examples from a parents' meeting in an extracurricular activity center
- ‘From where we're sat …’: Negotiating narrative transformation through interaction in police interviews with suspects
- Narratives in the workplace: Facts, fictions, and canonicity
- Small stories as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis
- Constructing ethnicity in New Zealand workplace stories
- Who tells which story and why? Micro and macro contexts in narrative
- Postscript: Plurifunctional narratives
