For more than a century, people have been referring to psychotherapy as the talking cure, with still vague understandings as to what it is about talking that is curative or therapeutic. What does talking have to do with how one understands and experiences reality? Why do therapists portray clients’ concerns and solutions to them so differently? Such questions have prompted lots of theorizing by psychotherapists from often strikingly different orientations to practice. For those who turn to research for definitive answers, the results can often be similarly dissatisfying. The stance taken by discursive therapists and discursive researchers of therapy can perplex readers, especially if they overlook how language is used when representing and intervening in therapeutic realities.
Some of the perplexity might relate to therapeutic models’ root metaphors (Pepper, 1942; Turnbull, 2003) for the foci and processes of therapeutic discourse in the first place. Are the concerns clients present, for example, about faulty information processing, ids needing taming, aversive childhood experiences, or dysfunctional patterns of relationships? What about therapeutic discourse or the talking between clients and therapists itself: are therapists doing forms of conversational surgery, can they administer conversational interventions in dosages, can good therapists engineer transformational experiences? These can seem silly questions to therapists and researchers who have taken up a discursive turn. For them, and for the authors of this volume, discourse is how humans negotiate and navigate socially constructed experiences, processes, concerns, and aspirations with each other. As for how all of this pertains to discursive researchers and therapists, their metaphors of interest relate to discourse as linguistically constructed meaning, and discourse as language use in human interactions.
If you are feeling uncomfortable reading about this language of metaphors as accounting for what is real, welcome to the club, but get used to it. Experiences and things do not name themselves; humans do and hold each other to account regarding the “right” or best ways to use language in describing those things and objects. To discursively informed practitioners and researchers, language use involves more than passive exchanges of information computed for accuracy and algorithmic decision-making (Ortega & Vidal, 2011). Important things are at stake over how language gets used, as debates over psychiatric diagnoses (e.g., Frances, 2013) underscore at a big picture level, but also in how therapists and clients wordsmith their ways forward in therapeutic conversation. Some see a more deferential thing occurring between client and therapist, where authoritative roles and expertise are to govern what gets talked about and how that talking is to occur (Rose, 1990). Beyond the consulting room, therapeutic discourse has found its way into people’s everyday conversations and understandings—enough to have become a default discourse of self-understanding for many (Illouz, 2008).
Discourse, in the sense that most authors here will use the term, refers to conversational processes and meanings, without a sense that there is a “right” or more-real-than-others way to understand and humanly interact. Discourse, down to words, gestures, tones of voice (etc.), and their conversational use, is the focus of the work of psychotherapy. For discursive therapists, conversational work is needed to respond to the ways of understanding and communicating that clients bring in related to their concerns and aspirations, while negotiating changes to client problem or aspirational discourse. That work for discursive researchers is analyzable for what gets used in and is seen to result from therapeutic discourse.
Discursive approaches to therapy came into vogue in the 1980s. They drew on the linguistic insights of philosophers of science, like Wittgenstein (1953), Gadamer (1988), and Foucault (1973), but also the socio-political concerns of feminist (e.g., Weisstein, 1971) and postcolonial critics (e.g., Fanon, 1967). Inherent to the discursive approaches to therapy (primarily narrative, solution-focused, and collaborative therapy) is a view that meaning is socially constructed and that therapy itself is as a meaning-making/changing endeavor (McNamee & Gergen, 1992). Differences in approach between therapists occur over the relevance of macro-political influences, such as cultural and institutional discourses, over the micro-dynamics of therapeutic dialogue, as the focus of therapy (Monk & Gehart, 2003). One finds similar differences in discursive forms of research where the focus can be macro, as in the case of critical discourse analysis, or micro, as in the case of conversational analysis (Gale, Lawless, & Roulston, 2004). Regardless, the focus of discursive therapists is to converse with help clients change their problem-sustaining or problem-saturated discourse, be that from problem talk to solution talk, bad to better stories, or hosting collaborative dialogues focused on client preference and resourcefulness (Friedman, 1993). Thus, discursive therapists have been particularly interested in conversational practices helpful in deconstructing problem meanings while co-constructing more client-preferred meanings and directions (Paré, 2013).
While discursive therapists (Lock & Strong, 2012) borrow from discourse theory, their models do so quite differently. Narrative therapists (White & Epston, 1990; White, 2007), for example, draw heavily from Foucault, using questions to externalize and make explicit the workings of dominant discourses and stories in clients’ lives, so that clients can consider and possibly enact more preferred alternatives. Solution-focused therapists (e.g., deShazer, 1994) negotiate clients’ ways of talking/understanding from problem-focused language games to solution-focused, strengths-informed language games. Collaborative therapists (Anderson, 1997) see conversation as the means by which problems organize people’s thinking and interacting, needed are pragmatic conversations that dis-solve the problem-organized conversations, so that more preferred conversations can occur. Reflexive questions as conversational interventions are central to these meaning-focused therapies (Tomm, 1987); that is, questions are used intentionally, to invite from clients deconstructive conversations associated with problem meaning, or to invite conversations that construct preferred meanings, such as solutions. Common across these discursive therapies is a socially constructed view that meaning is revisable, though not correctly knowable in some general way. It would be wrong, however, to regard discursive therapies as only those just described. Increasingly, therapist-researchers are attending to emergent meanings in therapy, focusing on “responsiveness,” pointing to a reflexive or discursive dimension of an otherwise normally practiced therapy (Kramer & Stiles, 2015).
Discourse analysts have largely approached psychotherapy critically, as a suspect institutional activity focused on “helping” clients adjust to normative societal expectations. This line of critique has been most evident in the “psy-complex” program of research of Nikolas Rose (1985) and influenced by Foucault’s writing on discourse and “biopower” (1962, 2006). While discursive therapists have often had backgrounds in psychology, these discursive researchers more typically have brought a sociological focus to their examinations of therapy. Family therapy has been somewhat unique for owing some of its origins to communicationally focused research at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California (e.g., Watzlawick, Bevan Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967). A common sociological derivation for many discourse analysts is Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological studies where the focus is on social orders and their tacit performance in socially situated, yet accountable ways. This focus more specifically tends to be on the micro-interactional features of therapeutic discourse as they occur between client and therapist moment-by-moment, turn by conversational turn. Most commonly, this focus is associated with conversation analysis (e.g., Peräkylã, Antaki, Vehviläinen, & Leudar, 2008), and rarely is it found in mainstream therapy research journals. More often, such studies appear in sociology and discourse analysis journals. Regardless of the kind of discursive research done of therapeutic discourse, very little of it currently influences the practice of discursive therapy.
Perhaps this psychological/sociological divide can help to explain why discursive therapists and discursive researchers are working apart. Psychology has tended to focus on individual behaviors, cognitions, and emotions largely bracketing off social influences, whereas sociology turns to cultural, institutional, and social influences when accounting for the same things psychologists attribute to the individual. In some respects, discourse or language use complicates things further, cutting across both individuals and social entities. People’s words are not determined socially, even in face-to...