Volume 48, Issue 1

Psychotherapy constitutes one of the contexts in which narrating one's personal experience is highly encouraged and expected. By telling their life stories, clients are able to organize their "autobiographical self" as well as voice the aspects of their experience that need therapeutic intervention in order for the client to live a more fulfilling life. Informed by insights and methods of conversation analysis and discourse analysis, this paper discusses narrative as a practice situated within social interaction. The study examines how clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy sessions emerge as co-constructed interactional accomplishments, focusing on the active role of the psychotherapist in facilitating clients' troubles-telling. The functions of the therapist's interventions will be scrutinized in terms of their interactional and sequential import as well as corrective functions. The analysis presented in this study is based on two psychotherapy sessions conducted by the same psychotherapist working within the theoretical framework of Relationship-Focused Integrative Psychotherapy.

This paper investigates forms and functions of narratives of illness and emotional distress in executive coaching. This relatively recent professional format has originated from the practical application of managerial and psychotherapeutic interventions and can be understood as a translation of the therapeutic habitus into the managerial realm. In this context, clients' emotional experiences take center stage, yet not for the sole purpose of clients' self-reflexivity and self-fulfillment, but for organizational purposes such as evoking peak-performance in the executive. It is claimed here that clients' narratives of emotional distress and their processing, not only fulfill an emancipatory function that allow for the verbalization of less-dominant discourses and the staging of less-dominant identities, but simultaneously serve as situated practices of functionalizing emotions for the organization.

In a setting featuring communicators of different generations, linguistic variation co-occurs with strongly categorizing expectations shaped by normative views of age identities, roles and discourses. On the other hand, social actors consciously use linguistic means to achieve a variety of ends, for example claiming common or distinct ground (with/from others) by sharing or contesting meanings. Narrative is one of these means. In the context researched here it involves not only life course accounts or longer autobiographic narratives, but also small stories (cf. Bamberg and Georgakopoulou 2008). Although researchers (e.g. Kemper et al. 1989) found an age-related decrement in the complexity of stories told by adults, which is due to working memory limitations, intergenerational conversations are full of narratives which the older and the younger co-produce. In a set of interviews, interlocutors of disparate generations shared stories on a variety of topics. The qualitative analysis focused on the mechanisms of the stories being collaboratively produced and the patterns of participants taking on their telling roles. In the results, the short, personal narratives are shown to be the interactional achievement of communicative goals. Storytelling in interaction is an individual self-projection, shaped by specific social values and drawn from specific cultural resources, and, importantly, accomplished together with the interlocutor.

This study focuses on how adolescent females use discursive tools in order to get things done in talk. The focus of the analysis falls on situated narratives that speakers adapt in the context of wanting to simultaneously affiliate with, resist, and refine their identity. The claim made in this study is that the telling of small stories in a conversation does not only provide the connective tissue for the projection of identity but also binds interactants together. Also it will be argued that the stories coalesce in the course of their tellings with links to previous, present and future interactions, as well as to other tellings. Finally, the discussion will look into the implications of narratives-in-interaction for identity research. It will be argued that the telling of situated narratives is a privileged communication mode for the construction of discursive identities, provided tellers use them proficiently and skillfully. The conversations selected for the analysis are a part of longer interaction between three girls in early adolescence. The conversations, in Polish, were audio recorded, transcribed and subsequently translated into English.

The present paper presents gendered narratives produced during research interviews with readers of a wedding magazine. While interpreting media texts, the women gave accounts of their bridal and feminine experience. Of all understandings of a narrative proposed in discourse analysis, the ones taken here are of a situated construction of self in interaction (Taylor 2006) and of an established sequence of life trajectory (Bruner 1991). Accordingly, the lived experience of identity is approached as discursively mediated – by the available set of subject positions and interpretative repertoires. In the analysis, the interviewees are found to employ socio-culturally accumulated resources of self-construction in talk. Their narrative work reveals how speakers (despite their dependency on the intertextual reservoir of notions, images and associations) seek to position themselves as independent and agentic subjects of discourse.

This paper focuses on gendered constructions of success and failure in narratives produced in a specific cultural context. The paper presents results of the analysis of narratives produced in the context of a class reunion. The ca. 10,000-word corpus is made up of 28 short, autobiographical narratives told by 18 females and 10 males in 2007, in Hungary. A discourse-analytical approach is applied, which makes possible the combination of a close analysis of actual texts, the self-presentation of women and men in front of their class mates, and of the wider social-cultural context in which they are produced and consumed. An analysis of narrative networks links the local-interactional and social-discursive functions of the narratives. First, macro-topics of success and failure are identified then their linguistic expressions are examined focusing on distancing through the frequent use of slang, mitigation and self-irony. Results are explained by the ambivalent relationship towards success in the Hungarian value-system as well as by the gender-differentiated meaning of the concepts of success and failure.