This book addresses the premise that therapy can be understood, practiced, and researched as a discursive activity. Using varied forms of discourse analysis, it examines the cultural, institutional, and face-to-face communications that shape, and occur within, therapies that are discursively understood and practiced. By first providing an overview of commonalities across discursive therapies and research approaches, the authors discursively examine general aspects of therapy. Topics explored include subjectivity, psychological terms, institutional influences, therapeutic relationships, therapists’ ways of talking and questioning, discursive ethics, and assessment of therapeutic processes and outcomes. This book offers a macro-analysis of the conversational practices of a discursively informed approach to therapy; as well as a micro-analysis of the ways in which language shapes and is used in a discursively informed approach to therapy. This book will interest practitioners seeking to better understand therapy as a discursive process, and discourse analysts wanting to understand therapy as discursive therapists might practice it.

Social Justice and Counseling represents the intersection between therapy, counseling, and social justice. The international roster of contributing researchers and practitioners demonstrate how social justice unfolds, utterance by utterance, in conversations that attend to social inequities, power imbalances, systemic discrimination, and more. Beginning with a critical interrogation of the concept of social justice itself, subsequent sections cover training and supervising from a social justice perspective, accessing local knowledge to privilege client voices, justice and gender, and anti-pathologizing and the politics of practice. Each chapter concludes with reflection questions for readers to engage experientially in what authors have offered. Students and practitioners alike will benefit from the postmodern, multicultural perspectives that underline each chapter.

For an endeavour that is largely based on conversation it may seem obvious to suggest that psychotherapy is discursive. After all, therapists and clients primarily use talk, or forms of discourse, to accomplish therapeutic aims. However, talk or discourse has usually been seen as secondary to the actual business of therapy - a necessary conduit for exhanging information between therapist and client, but seldom more. Psychotherapy primarily developed by mapping particular experiential domains in ways responsive to human intervention. Only recently though has the role that discourse plays been recognized as a focus in itself for analysis and intervention. Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice presents an overview of discursive perspectives in therapy, along with an account of their conceptual underpinnings. The book starts by setting out the case for a discursive and relational approach to therapy by justaposing it to the tradition that that leads to the diagnostic approach of the DSM-V and medical psychiatry. It then presents a thorough review of a range of innovative discursive methods, each presented by an authority in their respective area. The book shows how discursive therapies can help people construct a better sense of their world, and move beyond the constraints caused by the cultural preconceptions, opinions, and values the client has about the world. The book makes a unique contribution to the philosophy and psychiatry literature in examining both the philosophical bases of discursive therapy, whilst also showing how discursive perspectives can be applied in real therapeutic situations. The book will be of great value and interest to psychotherapists and psychiatrists wishing to understand, explore, and apply these innovative techniques.

Based on the complete transcripts from a marital therapy session, this analysis examines the constructivistic nature of conversation, rhetorical devices used in pursuit of a therapeutic agenda, and dialogue as a systemic process. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

'Saving the Modern Soul' explores the impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives & on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz examines how self-help culture has transformed emotional life & how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences.

Collaborative Therapy: Relationships and Conversations That Make a Difference provides in-depth accounts of the everyday practice of postmodern collaborative therapy, vibrantly illustrating how dialogic conversation can transform lives, relationships, and entire communities. Pioneers and leading professionals from diverse disciplines, contexts, and cultures describe in detail what they do in their therapy and training practices, including their work with psychosis, incarceration, aging, domestic violence, eating disorders, education, and groups. In addition to the therapeutic applications, the book demonstrates the usefulness of a postmodern collaborative approach to the domains of education, research, and organizations.

This book is an empirical study of naturally occurring interaction between child counselling professionals and young children experiencing parental separation or divorce. Based on tape recordings of the work of a London child counselling practice, it offers the reader a unique and sustained look inside the child counselling consultation room at the talk that occurs there. The book uses conversation analysis against a backdrop of sociological work in childhood and family studies to situate the discourse of child counselling at an interface between the increasing incitement to communicate in modern society, the growing recognition of children’s social competence and agency, and the enablements and constraints of institutional forms of discourse participation. Chapters include overviews of recent developments in the sociology of childhood and the sociolinguistics of children’s talk; conversation analysis and institutional discourse; and detailed empirical studies of the linguistic techniques by which counsellors draw out children’s concerns about family trauma and the means by which children, through talking and avoiding talking, either cooperate in or resist their therapeutic subjectification. This book will be of interest to readers in counselling psychology and practitioners of child counselling; to researchers and advanced students in social psychology, sociology and sociolinguistics; and to others interested in childhood and family studies, interactionism, qualitative methodology and conversation analysis.

Challenging Aphasia Therapies presents an entirely new approach to thinking on the subject of aphasia therapy by liberating it from traditional models. This is achieved through a process of reflection in which many assumptions previously taken for granted are challenged and reassessed. Internationally renowned experts successfully demonstrate the benefits of learning about aphasia therapy through the process of engaging in it. Topics covered include: * the role of context, culture and conversation in shaping and directing aphasia therapy * the ethical issues that arise from the current tensions between market driven health care industries and the moral commitment to their client welfare * the value of therapy. Contributors challenge the common notion of successful therapy as solely performance related. * the potential and competent use of humour in aphasia therapy. The identification of the strengths and limitations of clinical models and the focus on relevant directions for therapy will be of interest to practising clinicians as well as anyone involved in study or research in speech and language therapy.

"The Etherized Wife provides a comprehensive examination of the evolution of sex therapy through the prism of gender. The book makes the argument that in sex therapy, like other domains of life in which men set the standard of normality, women have been judged normal to the degree they match men's expectations. What is particularly striking about this bias is that it contradicts therapists' overt identification with feminism and the battle against women's inequality. To support these claims, Leslie Margolin maps a series of case studies drawn from the discipline's own literature-the articles and books that have been, and continue to be treated as exemplars of the discipline's collective consciousness. Through examination of case studies which focus on discrepancies in sexual desire, where the man wants more sex and the woman less, the book shows how therapists have favoured the man's side. The Etherized Wife shows how the sex therapy discipline has unintentionally enshrined male sexuality as the model of normal, natural, healthy sexuality"--