Therapy as Discourse

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction to Discursive Research and Discursive Therapies

   • Tom Strong, Olga Smoliak

   Pages 1-18

3. Discourse in Psychotherapy: Using Words to Create Therapeutic Practice

   • Jarl Wahlström

   Pages 19-44

4. Researching the Discursive Construction of Subjectivity in Psychotherapy

   • Evrinomy Avdi, Eugenie Georgaca

   Pages 45-69

5. The Alliance as a Discursive Achievement: A Conversation Analytical Perspective

   • Adam O. Horvath, Peter Muntigl

   Pages 71-93

6. Discursive Therapies as Institutional Discourse

   • Gale Miller

   Pages 95-116

7. Reflexive Questions as Constructive Interventions: A Discursive Perspective

   • Joaquín Gaete, Olga Smoliak, Shari Couture

   Pages 117-140

8. Transforming Gender Discourse in Couple Therapy: Researching Intersections of Societal Discourse, Emotion, and Interaction

   • Carmen Knudson-Martin, Jessica ChenFeng, Aimee Galick, Elsie Lobo, Sarah K. Samman, Kirstee Williams

   Pages 141-162

9. Conversation Analysis, Discourse Analysis and Psychotherapy Research: Overview and Methodological Potential

   • Eleftheria Tseliou

   Pages 163-186

10. Discursive Ethics in Therapeutic Encounters

    • Olga Smoliak, Tom Strong, Robert Elliott

    Pages 187-217

11. Discursive Research from an Assimilation Model Perspective

    • William B. Stiles

    Pages 219-229

12. Back Matter

    Pages 231-237

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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.

• discourse analysis
• cultural studies
• psychology research approaches
• discursive therapies
• discursive ethics
• psychotherapy
• social interaction
• counselling and clinical psychology
• communication studies
• linguistics
• subjectivity in psychotherapy
• gender discourse
• emotion

• University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada

  Olga Smoliak

• University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

  Tom Strong

Olga Smoliak is an Associate Professor in Couple and Family Therapy at the University of Guelph, Canada. She uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to investigate how psychological matters are constituted discursively. Olga has studied interactional methods used in therapy to give advice, collaborate, accomplish therapeutic tasks, and negotiate responsibility for blameworthy conduct. 


Tom Strong is a Professor, couple and family therapist, and counsellor-educator at the University of Calgary, Canada. Tom researches and writes on the collaborative, critically-informed and practical potentials of discursive approaches to psychotherapy.

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