The Nature of Therapeutic Discourse: Accounts of the Self

AbstractDue to the problems involved in trying to determine the validity of life history accounts in the psychoanalytically based encounter, the concept of narrative has proven very useful for promoting the view that the client's tellings represent different versions of the truth rather than a truth that exists prior to and independent of the storied constructions, as Freud's archeological model would have it. However, although the irreducibly narrative character of client talk is not contested, the claim developed herein is that client talk is structured around the practice of account-giving—more specifically, giving accounts of the self. Our mode of investigating this claim was to examine a client's use of a pair of linguistic markers (the discourse markers I MEAN and SO), which have been characterized as forms that function expressively to convey the speaker's attitudes and evaluative stance toward the content of the discourse. Based on this characterization, it was hypothesized that, in the therapeutic context, such forms would be used by the client as a way of carrying out the proposed agenda of providing self-accounts. (Discourse Analysis/Psychotherapy Research)