Abstract
Conversation analysis (CA) of children-adult—interaction in various contexts has become an established field of research. However, child therapy has received limited attention in CA. In child therapy, the general psychotherapeutic practice of achieving empathy faces particular challenges. In relation to this, our contribution sets out three issues for investigation and analysis: the first one is that practices of achieving empathy must be preceded by efforts aiming to establish which kind of individualized conversation works with this child (Midgley, 2006). Psychotherapy process researchers in adult therapy (Stiles et al., 2015) have found that therapists “invent” a new therapy for each patient (Norcross and Wampold, 2018). The second issue is that it can be difficult for adults to understand the ways in which children express their conflicts and issues. In particular, play activities in therapy, e.g., with dolls, can open up additional scenarios of interaction. The play scenario can be used to disclose unformulated problems masked in everyday and family interactions. The third issue is how to respect the child's higher degree of vulnerability, compared with adult patients. How is it communicated and dealt with in therapy? We present an interaction analysis of a single case study of the first 20 min of a child therapy session with an adopted girl aged 4 years brought to treatment because of “unexplainable rage.” The session was videotaped; parents granted permission. We analyze this session using an applied version of CA. In our analysis, we describe “doing contrariness,” as a conversational practice producing epistemic and affiliative disruptions, while “avoiding doing contrariness” and “remedying contrariness” are strategies for preserving or restoring the affiliative dimension of a relationship (in child therapy). We show how these practices operate in various modes and how they are used by both parties in our case study to variously aid and impedethe achievement of empathy and understanding.
Highlights
We focused on the complex practice we call “doing contrariness,” and two ways to deal with it, the pre-emptive strategy “avoiding contrariness,” and “remedying contrariness,” a kind of repair
We suggest in addition that it would be extremely useful for the interactional analysis of psychotherapy to develop general criteria for when turn sequences can be considered anomalous or deviant and to study how this relates to nonprogression of communication or even violent outbursts
The most successful attempts at remedying contrariness we observed consisted of collaborative efforts, in which both participants had to signal their agreement to accept a proposed solution as a repair. We suggest that such a solution involves an additional step in learning and distinguishing: in a further unexpected move, participants conducted a shift from affiliation to epistemics or between roles they assumed and opened a new way for re-establishing communication
Summary
DOING CONTRARINESSInteraction involving children has been extensively studied in conversation analysis (CA) (Goodwin, 2006; Kidwell, 2013). Others have studied interaction with children with Asperger’s syndrome (Rendle-Short, 2017), the role of fatherhood in family therapy (Suoninen and Wahlström, 2010), or of morality in helping institutions (Bergmann, 1990). Hutchby (2007) studied the work of counselors with children of 6 years (or older) whose parents were divorcing. Hutchby documents that handbooks for counselors do not sufficiently inform on how to achieve that aim because they ignore the conversational details. He makes a strong argument for studying the “true richness of the interactional resources brought into play by both counselors and children” Hutchby here uses the term “resistance” as equal to “unwillingness” (p. 121); in medical sociology, the term “noncompliance” is used to describe when patients do not follow their doctor’s instructions
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