How practitioners deal with their clients' "off-track" talk

Charles Antaki

In institutional encounters where a client engages with a practitioner for advice or guidance, there is a phase in which the client may be expected to ‘tell their tale’ before the practitioner offers a response. In this chapter I shall analyse the kind of professional conversation which involves with a client being invited to describe a personal and indeed intimate problem, in order for the professional to offer their perspective (and possibly suggest a solution). The client’s problems here are matters of emotion, conflict or life-style, caused or sharpened by psychological disorder or disability – in other words, we shall be listening in to what the editors term as the ‘professional format’ of the counselling, personal-support and therapy consultation.

Published online: 18 December 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.252.02ant

References

Antaki, Charles, and Andrew Jahoda

2010 “Psychotherapists’ Practices in Keeping a Session “On-track” in the Face of Clients’ “Off-track” Talk.” Communication & Medicine 7: 11–21.

Antaki, Charles, W.M.L. Finlay, and Chris Walton

2009 “Choice for People with an Intellectual Impairment in Official Discourse and in Practice.” Journal of Policy and Practice in Intellectual Disabilities 6 (4): 260–266.

Dryden, Windy

(ed.) 2007 Dryden’s Handbook of Individual Therapy. London: Sage.

Heritage, John

1984 “A Change of State Token and Aspects of Its Sequential Organisation.” In Structures of Social Action, ed. by John. M. Atkinson, and John Heritage, 299–345.  Cambridge: CUP and Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Heritage, John, and D.R. Watson

1979 “Formulations as Conversational Objects.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 123–162. New York: Irvington.

Jefferson, Gail

1984 “On Stepwise Transition from Talk about a Trouble to Inappropriately Next-positioned Matters.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies of Conversation Analysis, ed. by John M. Atkinson, and John Heritage, 191–222. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Maynard, D.W., and C.L. Marlaire

1992 “Good Reasons for Bad Testing Performance: The Interactional Substrate of Educational Exams.” Qualitative Sociology 15: 177–202.

Peräkylä, Annsi, Charles Antaki, Sanna Vehviläinen, and Ivan Leudar

(eds) 2008 Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peräkylä, Annsi, and Sanna Vehviläinen

2003 “Conversation Analysis and the Professional Stocks of Interactional Knowledge.” Discourse & Society 14 (6): 727–750.

Sacks, Harvey

1987 “On the Preferences for Contiguity and Agreement in Sequences in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organisation, ed. by Graham Button, and John R. Lee, 54–69. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

1992 Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Schegloff, Emanuel A.

1979 “The Relevance of Repair to Syntax-for-Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 12: Discourse and Syntax, ed. by Talmy Givon, 261–286. New York: Academic Press.

1982 “Discourse as an Interactional Achievement: Some Use of ’uh huh’ and Other Things that Come Between Sentences.” In Analyzing Discourse: Text and Talk (Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics), ed. by Deborah Tannen, 71–93. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

2007 Sequence Organisation in Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Val

2010 Disability and Discourse: Analysing Inclusive Conversation with People with Intellectual Disabilities. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Wright, Jesse H., Monica Ramirez Basco, and Michael E. Thase

2006 Learning Cognitive-behavior Therapy: An Illustrated Guide. Arlington: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Yearley, S., and J. Brewer

1989 “Stigma and conversational competence: a conversation analytic study of the mentally handicapped”. Human Studies 12: 97–115.

Cited by

Cited by other publications

Rossen, Camilla Blach, Karen Nissen Schriver, Christel Tarber, Dorthe Vedel Nordahl, Grethe Thygesen Rasmussen, Ben Ong & Niels Buus

2020. “Y, what do you think about what X just said?” Conversation analysis of stance‐eliciting questions in open dialogue network meetings. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 june 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.