Reformulations of agentless talk in psychotherapy

Abstract

In this paper we describe and analyze the development of a psychotherapist's reformulations of one client's initial agentless problem narration. The concept ‘agentless’ refers to the use of impersonal constructions—passive voice, nominalizations, zero-person construction, and iterative verbs— which all imply having no control over the described actions. ‘Agentless talk’ is viewed in this paper as a strategy to escape full personal responsibility and thus as a strategy to save one's moral face (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987; Goffman 1955). In this case, the therapist approached the dilemma between protecting the client's face and fulfilling the institutional goal of helping the client by varying the footing in his reformulations of problem descriptions. Delicateness in the therapist's reformulations, as found in the data, can thus be seen as more than conversational etiquette; it is a necessary therapeutic tool. To account for the changes taking place in the therapeutic process, no reference to models of inner psychological structures or organization was needed, which poses a question of the quality of ‘therapeutic change’.

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