Therapeutic alliance is a central concept in psychotherapeutic work. The relationship between the therapist and the patient plays an important role in the therapeutic process and outcome. In this article, we investigate how therapists work with disaffiliation resulting from enduring disagreement while maintaining an orientation to the psychotherapeutic project at hand. Data come from a total of 18 sessions of two dyads undergoing psychoanalytic psychotherapy and is analyzed with conversation analysis. We found that collaborative moves deployed amidst enduring disagreement can (...) assist the therapist in furthering the disagreement as part of the ongoing psychotherapeutic project. Relying on their collaborative format, therapists utilize collaborative moves to temporarily mend the disaffiliation without necessarily changing their position and re-affiliating with the patient. We show how the relation between the therapist and the patient gets transformed in the moment-by-moment work accomplished in the psychotherapeutic talk. (shrink)

Four couple therapy first consultations involving clients with diagnosed narcissistic problems were examined. A sociologically enriched and broadened concept of narcissistic disorder was worked out based on Goffman’s micro-sociology of the self. Conversation analytic methods were used to study in detail episodes in which clients resist to answer a therapist’s question, block or dominate the development of the conversation’s topic, or conspicuously display their interactional independence. These activities are interpreted as a pattern of controlling practices that were prompted by threats (...) that the first couple therapy consultation imposes upon the clients’ self-image. The results were discussed in the light of contemporary psychiatric discussions of narcissism; the authors suggest that beyond its conceptualization as a personality disorder, narcissism should be understood as a pattern of interactional practices. (shrink)

Psychological radio counselling is a relatively recent development in psychological practice, where professionals provide psychological help via mass media communication. In the media context, a professional and a help-seeker face a number of communicative challenges, one of which is to close the encounter meaningfully with regard to its counselling and radio tasks. This study explicates how radio counselling encounters can be rounded off by summarising and reviewing the progress achieved in understanding the caller’s problem. At the end of the encounters, (...) the radio psychologist invited callers to look back at the conversation and to formulate possible gains from it. On one hand, the radio psychologist encouraged callers’ reflection and acknowledged the callers’ entitlement to pass judgement on the outcomes of the encounter. On the other hand, the radio psychologist checked and subsequently reviewed the caller’s understanding of his or her problem and its solutions. We discuss how the practice was used to round off the encounters in a distinct way with an orientation to their counselling and radio objectives. (shrink)