Therapeutic Vision: Eliciting Talk about Feelings in Child Counselling for Family Separation

Abstract

Based on a research project which involved the tape recording, transcription, and analysis of talk between counsellors and young children who were experiencing parental separation or family break-up, this chapter outlines the key discourse practices involved in what can be called the ‘therapeutic vision’ of child counsellors. Therapeutic vision is a variant of ‘professional vision’ (Goodwin, 1994), which refers broadly to ways of seeing and understanding events according to occupationally relevant norms. Professional vision tends to involve three types of practice: (1) highlighting certain features of a perceptual field as opposed to others; (2) coding those features according to given, professionally available knowledge schemas; and (3) producing material representations (such as diagrams, graphs, tables, or models) of the salient phenomena.