Abstract

Psychoanalytic psychotherapy has placed great emphasis on 'talk' with the analyst enjoined to attend to the fine detail of utterance. We explore the consequences of a tension between the injunction to a careful attention to the detail of speaking and the lack of a shared set of guidelines for the recording and representation of speech. We consider the possibility that standard conventions of CA transcription are inadequate to the task of representing psychoanalytic talk in a way which could ground an understanding of the process of psychotherapy. The centrality of 'countertransference' emerges as key to the psychoanalytic mode of understanding psychotherapeutic interaction, a point we illustrate with examples.