Sequencing in Short-Term Psychotherapy

Abstract

This chapter investigates how therapists actively listen over several turns at talk. A third way of uncovering details about how the therapeutic relationship is produced and practised using talk, is to go beyond active listening devices and adjacency pairs. Therapy does not occur in discrete adjacent utterances but over the course of therapy, which itself has a noticeable structure. There are numerous different sequence types to be discovered and these patterns can span several turns (Peräkylä et al., 2008; Voutilainen et al., 2011). This chapter will be concerned with one such pattern obvious in this type of therapy where extended turns by a client, while being actively listened to by the therapist, alternate with therapist formulations. The previous two chapters documented the use of therapist formulations and continuers in the therapy separately from how therapists’ listen actively to clients’ extended turns. This chapter will analyse how the two of these, in addition, to some questions go together. It will become apparent that there is a pattern and one can track how exactly this pattern is produced. Also, this type of pattern seems to be quite specific to this kind of therapy, which expects the client to be active with the therapist supporting them. As far as CA is concerned the turn-taking system is always the same but used differently to produce different extended sequences in therapy in general.