Clients' deference in psychotherapy.

Abstract

In the present study, 14 psychotherapy clients were interviewed about their recollections, assisted by tape replay, of an immediately preceding therapy session. A major category derived from a grounded theory analysis of the interview protocols was client's deference to the therapist, constituted of 8 lower level categories: concern about the therapist's approach, fear of criticizing the therapist, understanding the therapist's frame of reference, meeting the perceived expectations of the therapist, accepting the therapist's limitations, client's metacommunication, threatening the therapist's self-esteem, and indebtedness to the therapist. The P. Brown and S. Levinson (1987) model of politeness in discourse both informs and is informed by the results of this study, which are also discussed in terms of recent literature on the client's covert experience and in terms of their implications for the practice of therapy. Apart from some notable exceptions (e.g., Orlinsky & Howard, 1975; Strupp, Wallach, & Wogan, 1964), until recently psychotherapy researchers generally have shown little interest in seeking clients ' reports on their experience of therapy as a way of extending the understanding of the process of therapy. Historically, this lack of interest can be traced to the influence of behaviorism, positivism, and psychoanalysis, all of which, for different reasons, have contributed to the field's misgiving about the value of verbal reports of conscious experience (cf. Ericsson & Simon, 1980; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Lately, however, in the wake of the cognitive revolution and, in some instances, of the social constructionist movement (see Gergen, 1982, 1985), psychotherapy researchers have applied both the