Clients' responses to therapists' reinterpretations

This chapter is based on a corpus of about 100 sessions, mainly audio-taped, run in Italy by cognitive and relational-systemic therapists. We have identified a type of action, which we call re-interpretation, 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' re-interpretations in the overall structural organization of the therapies of our corpus. We also briefly compare them to formulations and psychoanalytic interpretations. This leads to the main concern of the chapter, which is clients' responses to re-interpretations. We identify some types of clients' responses and a corresponding array of procedural features, and discuss their import to the therapeutic process. In recent Conversation Analytic research on psychotherapy, clients' responses to therapists' interventions have often been analyzed in terms of acceptance vs. rejection of or resistance to them. This was so both where clients respond to formulations and to psychoanalytic interpretations. 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. Our tack is slightly different. Beyond the still-useful dimension of clients' acceptance vs. rejection or resistance, our findings point to a different dimension: we distinguish more active clients' responses, which contribute further relevant contents to the ongoing elaboration of their own events, from more passive ones, which do not. Special analytical attention is given to a kind of clients' responses, namely extended agreements, through which clients provide autobiographical material as evidence accounting for their agreement with the therapists' re-interpretations. We discuss how both participants orient to such responses and how clients' actions achieved through them contribute to some important tasks of the therapeutic work.