Jarl Wahlström

Reformulations of agentless talk in psychotherapy

Abstract In this paper we describe and analyze the development of a psychotherapists reformulations of one clients 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 ones moral face (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987; Goffman 1955). In this case, the therapist approached the dilemma between protecting the clients face and fulfilling the institutional goal of helping the client by varying the footing in his reformulations of problem descriptions. Delicateness in the therapists 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’.

Inviting Participation in Organizational Change Through Ownership Talk

This article takes the practitioner’s view toward and focuses on participation through talk within multiparty settings of one process consulting case. From the perspective of discursive psychology, the authors ask what happens in interaction when the consultant is working to put into practice the ideal of active client participation in organizational change. They argue that participation is established when psychological ownership of the process is displayed through talk in interaction. This happens when what the authors call “ownership talk” is used: A person is sharing his or her views, interests, and experiences related to the change process.The authors provide detailed observations and interpretations about how local rules of displaying ownership talk are provided by the consultant and how they are negotiated, tested, and followed by the participants. The value of the ownership talk concept in developing theory and practices within the fields of organizational change, organizational development, and process consulting work is discussed.

Inviting interactional change through “tricky situations” in consulting

Purpose – Consulting work aims to bring about changes in organizational performance. In OD‐consulting practices, changes are to be sought through conversational settings created for these purposes. The purpose of this paper is to take a discursive approach to change work and ask how interactional change is constructed and managed during multi‐party consulting conversations.Design/methodology/approach – A case episode from an authentic consultation event is presented. By combining ideas from discursive psychology and conversational analysis, it is shown that a consulting conversation may be socially sensitive and face‐threatening for all concerned.Findings – The paper shows how such a “tricky situation” is not to be avoided but to be actively constructed for facilitating change. The use of different discursive strategies for managing criticism and blame is demonstrated.Practical implications – Tricky situations involving criticism and blame can be used in facilitating interactional change. The consultants...

Calling in a witness: Negotiating and factualizing preferred outcomes in management consultation

Abstract This article examines how preferred outcomes are negotiated and factualized during organization development consulting conversations. Paradoxically, organizational performance in itself cannot actually be improved during the consultation conversations. Whatever changes there are to be made, they are to be sought within the conversational situation of consultation. Even the outcomes have to be negotiated and made visible for all participants. Using discursive psychology and conversational analysis, we show how interactional and discursive strategies can be used to achieve this in one consultation process. The consultant constructed what we call the position of a witness for some participants who were invited to talk about change. Such a position was constructed by defining the participant as someone who has knowledge about the issue under consideration, and as someone who can be seen as an independent observer whose words are not restricted in any way in advance. This position of a witness and the role of an audience were discursively utilized in factualizing preferred outcomes of the consulting process as convincing. To our knowledge, this kind of factualizing of preferred outcomes in consultation has not been studied earlier.

Narrative Transformations and Externalizing Talk in a Reflecting Team Consultation

This article reports on a therapeutic consultation session following the reflecting team working format. A stanza form of transcription of the original video recording is used to present the narrative constructions of the consultation process, and the transformation of these constructions. This method of transcription and analysis seeks to convey to the reader the dynamics of tellings and reformulations of the clients problem story as they emerged in the conversational exchanges between consultant and client, and between the members of the reflecting team. The creation and use of an externalized fictive agent in the conversation is shown. This externalizing talk served to afford new agentic positions for the client in relation to her presented problem of ‘ineffectiveness’, and to recast the moral ordering of the problem story. This case study attempts to offer the reader space for reflection on innovative working formats, the change process in therapeutic consultation, and the relationship between practice and research.

Soft Prosody and Embodied Attunement in Therapeutic Interaction: A Multimethod Case Study of a Moment of Change

This study focused on a moment of weeping in one psychotherapy case. The overall aim was to explore the role of “soft prosody” in psychotherapy interaction—that is, the participants’ use of pauses, a lower volume, slower rhythms, and softer intonation than in the surrounding speech. A mixed-method, micro-analytic perspective was applied to investigate (a) social interaction, including its verbal and nonverbal elements; (2) the participants’ bodily responses, including autonomic nervous system (ANS) measurements; and (3) the participants’ thoughts and feelings during the therapy session, as reported in subsequent individual interviews. Soft prosody was observed to be an important conversational tool. It was used in conveying affiliation and offering therapeutic formulations, and it appeared to contribute both to emotional attunement between the participants and to the therapeutic change that occurred during the interaction under study. Two differing bodily synchronization tendencies in the arousal levels were observed among the participants: (a) a complementary tendency—that is, when the clients arousal increased, the therapists decreased (occurring during the active therapeutic processing); and (b) a tendency to concurrent decreased arousal in all of the participants.

Displaying agency problems at the outset of psychotherapy

Abstract In order to present him- or herself at the outset of psychotherapy as a credible client, the person needs to, on one hand, formulate a sense of lost agency in accounts of his/her life situation, and on the other, to present him- or herself as willing and able to take part in conversational self-exploration. In this study, we looked in detail at how one person, seeking psychotherapy, constructed accounts that served this double function. We sought to develop the usefulness of the concept of agency as an integrative theoretical construct of core processes in therapy and introduced a model of five aspects of agentic vs. non-agentic presentation, developed and applied in an earlier study on clients in semi-mandatory counselling. The results show how those aspects – relationality, causal attribution, intentionality, historicity and reflexivity – were present in, or lacking from, accounts given by this one client entering voluntary psychotherapy. We conclude that qualitative process research could benefit from considering loss of agency as one crucial object of psychotherapy and the ongoing discursive formulations and re-formulations of the client’s more or less agentic positions as central to the process of therapy.

Conversations on contexts and meanings: On understanding therapeutic change from a contextual viewpoint

Recent developments within family therapy theory, often referred to as the Post-Milan Movement, have once again stressed the therapeutic encountersquality of conversation. When therapy is looked upon as conversation, attention is not only paid to the fact that most of what happens in a session is talking. Rather, a more fundamental stance towardshuman life as basically meaning- making is taken. This is one of the essential premises of the contextualist approach to the social sciences.When applied to human problems this approach claims that “symptoms” evolve when (1) a person gives meaning to and performs a social act within a context inappropriate to the socially shared meaning of that act, and (2) the behavior of the person is accepted as a “symptom” by him/herself and the observing community. The therapeutic conversation establishes an exclusive context within which the domains of discourse of the clients life can be accounted for and renegotiated. With the acceptance of these accounts, changes evolve in the context-act relationships (i.e. meanings) construed by the client. This appears to be the basis for the self-healing aspects of psychotherapy.

Constructions of Agency in Accounts of Drunk Driving at the Outset of Semi-Mandatory Counseling

Convicted drunk drivers, in accounts of their offenses, rarely display qualities of agency that would contribute to a favorable outcome in counseling. Instead, the discursive and rhetorical aim of the accounts is often to evade responsibility and ownership of the offending behavior. Such disclaim of personal agency can be achieved in various ways in the narration of drunk driving (DD) incidences. This study examined how five aspects of agentic presentation (reflexivity, historicity, intentionality, causal attribution, and relationality) were present in or missing from such accounts. It was found that a tentative model of (non)agentic display based on those five aspects could differentiate between the cases in a meaningful way and contribute to an understanding of the clients’ ways of positioning themselves in semi-mandatory counseling as well as of their uses of the counseling context.

Agency displays in stories of drunk driving: Subjectivity, authorship, and reflectivity

This study examined 30 stories of drunk driving (DD) recounted by repeat offenders in the early phase of a court-mandated counseling program. The focus of analysis was on displays of agency in the narrators’ portrayal of themselves as protagonists in the stories. The expressions of subjectivity, authorship, and reflectivity were considered as constructors of agency positions. In the analysis of the videotaped and transcribed stories, five story types of agency were found. They displayed the narrator-protagonists’ agency positions as either unconcerned, weak, egotistical, akratic, or disowned. The quality of telling is viewed as expressing the narrators’ problematic agency positions, readiness for personal change, and motivations to process the problem in counseling. The variety of disclaims of agency in DD are discussed as clients’ contributions at the outset of coerced counseling.