Clients' responses to therapists' reinterpretations

Abstract

This chapter is based on a corpus of about a hundred sessions, mainly audio taped, run in Italy by cognitive and relational-systemic therapists. We have identified a type of action, which we call reinterpretation , by which the therapist proposes his or her own version of the client's events and experiences, the therapist's version being grounded in another version of them previously provided by the client. We locate the placement of therapists' reinterpretations in the overall structural organization of the therapies of our corpus. We also briefly compare them to formulations (Antaki, Chapter 2 this volume) and psychoanalytic interpretations (Peräkylä, 2004a;Vehviläinen, 2003a). This leads to the main concern of the chapter, which is clients' responses to reinterpretations. We identify some types of clients' responses and a corresponding array of procedural features, and discuss their importance in the therapeutic process. In recent conversation analytic research on psychotherapy, clients' responses to therapists' interventions have often been analysed in terms of acceptance vs. rejection or resistance. This has been the case where clients respond to formulations (Antaki, Chapter 2, this volume; Antaki, Barnes & Leudar, 2004; 2005; Hak & de Boer, 1996; Hutchby, 2005) and to psychoanalytic interpretations (Peräkylä, 2005; Vehviläinen, Chapter 7, this volume). The same tack has been followed in research dealing with other similar phenomena, e.g. clients' responses to experts' formulations in medical settings where mental-health talk routinely occurs (Beach & Dixson, 2001).

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