The Social Construction of Language Incompetence and Social Identity in Psychotherapy
Texas A&M University
INTRODUCTION
Recent work in the dialogical or conversational version of social constructionism (Coulter, 1979; Gergen, 1994; Shotter, 1993) advances the notions that reality is interpersonally negotiable and that the social setting and its participants are primary in the ascription and ratification of mental states. McNamee and Gergen’s (1992) treatise Therapy as Social Construction, along with the work of Labov and Fanshel (1977), Therapeutic Discourse, and Ferrara (1994), Therapeutic Ways With Words, call attention to the discursive realities created within the setting of the psychotherapy session. Ferrara (1994) examines how language and self are mutually constructed in therapeutic discourse as people interweave pieces of their own and others’ sentences, metaphors, and narratives. The individual psychotherapy hour, actually 50 minutes, is a powerful force in the lives of hundreds of thousands of individuals as they work through problematic aspects of their lives with degree-holding and trained professionals, such as clinical psychologists and psychiatric social workers. Because language is both the method of diagnosis and the means of treatment in the so-called talking cure, it is surprising that so little is known about language use in psychotherapy.
Although the bulk of psychotherapy sessions are constructive events in the lives of clients, this chapter examines five discourse practices within the mental health community that contribute to the creation of client feebleness or linguistic incompetence, paying particular attention to the complex ways in which this role is responded to and sustained throughout the therapy session by the self- and other-appraisals of a multi-voiced community. It uses an ethnographically enriched discourse analysis to investigate language of the therapist, the absent but invoked mental health community, the client, and the client’s voice to self and others. The data are drawn from 48 hours of tape-recorded consecutive psychotherapy sessions, with special focus on the talk between three therapists and three clients in individual sessions in private practice in the American Southwest. Each client was audio recorded for six hour-long sessions over the course of 6 to 8 weeks. Both male and female clients and therapists are represented.
BACKGROUND
The seeds of a quiet revolution are currently being planted within the mental health community in the change from a modernist approach to a postmodern approach. Within the newer framework there is a healthy questioning of the premises generated from within the mental health community. As McNamee (1992) observes, “the modernist reliance on the individual as the primary organizing principle of society is replaced in postmodernism by a communal, relational, interactive attention to understanding the social order” (p. 191). Specifically, according to Fruggeri (1992, p. 41), therapists are beginning to question the medical model on which psychotherapy was developed and are attempting to demystify the therapist’s transformative skills and stance as expert.
The medical model relied on diagnosis of a disorder, a cure, and an expert knower who could administer a solution. This expert knower was able to navigate between the world of trained psychotherapists and the mind of the client. In fact, in an influential paper, Anderson and Goolishian (1992) have advocated what they call a “not-knowing approach to therapy.” In this approach the client is the expert. Taking the client as the expert involves the “abnegation of the role of the therapist as a superior knower, standing above the client as an unattainable model of the good life” (Gergen & Kaye, 1992, p. 74) and, instead, a shift toward “viewing the therapeutic encounter as a milieu for the creative generation of meaning.” In this framework the “client’s voice is not merely an auxiliary device for the vindication of the therapist’s pre-determined narrative, but serves … as an essential constituent of a jointly constructed reality” (p. 74). A small but growing number of scholars and practitioners share the view of Anderson and Goolishian (1992) that “human action takes place in a reality of understanding that is created through social construction and dialogue” (p. 26), and see that “meaning and understanding are socially constructed by persons in conversation, in language with one another. Thus, human action takes place in a reality of understanding that is created through social construction and dialogue” (p. 29).
However, as Gergen and Kaye (1992) admit, the vast majority of therapy still retains “significant vestiges of the modernist view” (p. 175). In short, the quiet revolution is in its earliest stage. Fewer than several dozen researchers are championing this approach to psychotherapy, and the filtering into the ranks of everyday practitioners has barely even started. We can compare the progress to the uphill battle for acceptance of the notion of “communicative competence” in another applied realm, that of language learning.
For that reason, we look in this chapter at specific ways in which psychotherapy, as actually practiced, falls short of the goals advocated by workers such as Gergen and Kaye, McNamee, Fruggeri, and Anderson and Goolishian. This chapter traces ways in which the context, or structure, of psychotherapy “furnishes the client a lesson in inferiority” (Gergen & Kaye, 1992, p. 171). All too often, “the client is indirectly informed that he or she is ignorant, insensitive, woolly-headed, or emotionally incapable of comprehending reality. In contrast, the therapist is positioned as all-knowing and wise” (Gergen & Kaye, 1992, p. 171).
Gergen and Kaye (1992) state that
the therapeutic process must inevitably result in the slow but inevitable replacement of the client’s story with the therapist’s. The client’s story does not remain a free-standing reflection of truth, but rather, as questions are asked and answered, descriptions and explanations are disseminated by the therapist, the client’s narrative is either destroyed or incorporated—but in any case replaced—by the professional account. (p. 171)
These views present a rather harsh picture so I invite the outside observer to be the judge, using examples from the corpus to form the basis for assessment. The large majority of client–therapist sessions are extremely therapeutic, often yielding lifelong benefits (see Ferrara, 1994). However, we can still ask if the darker side of therapy is that many therapists do not encourage people to accept themselves as they are, for who they are, but rather encourage clients to change by denigrating their language skills and sense of self.
FIVE GENERAL WAYS IN WHICH THERAPISTS REINFORCE THE SELF-PERCEPTION OF LANGUAGE INCOMPETENCE
In this chapter I identify five general practices, or strategies, in the mental health community and their role in reinforcing clients’ self-perception of language incompetence:
1. THE CREATION OF THE EXPERT-TO-NOVICE STANCE
2. METALINGUISTIC COMMENTARY ON THE PROPER USE OF LANGUAGE at the client’s expense
3. REAUTHORING EMOTIONS, squelching the Client’s Voice
4. THE MANUFACTURE OF HYPOTHETICAL DIALOGUE, in which the therapist speaks as if he/she had entered the mind of the client and were voicing his or her words
5. RECYCLING EPISODES OF COMMUNICATIVE FAILURE
Each of these practices is examined in turn in an attempt to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. Specific examples from actual discourse contain salient utterances indicated by arrows, boldface, or dots.
Strategy 1: The Expert-to-Novice Stance
The first strategy is creation of the expert-to-novice stance, in which the therapist draws on and the client accepts the medical model of a pathology or problem in need of a ‘cure’ and an expert practitioner. Three items play a part: (a) overt instruction, (b) the use of professional “we,” and (c) jargon (e.g., “fixation,” “project onto”). In Example 1, for instance, the male therapist tells a female client, “I want you to do some homework,” and “I want you to start learning how to have more control.” His stance is that of a professor, in charge of learning and giving a homework assignment, which he calls in the last line “a very clever assignment.”
| Therapist: | There’s something I’d like you to do. | |
| Client: | Okay. | |
| → | Therapist: | I want you to do some homework. Uh I want you to (4) take uh 10 important relationships to you … and I want you to uh like in one column put their name and in the second column I want you to put which part of you is most in (.) uh (3) most there in that relationship. Is it the cold aloof part or is it or is it the soft, warm-hearted. |
| …… | ||
| → | Therapist: | I want you to start learning how to have more control. |
| Client: | Okay. | |
| Therapist: | ‘Cause I think as soon as you learn how to (.) learn that you do have more control than you think you do, that you won’t feel great but that you’ll feel better. (2) | |
| Client: | Okay. | |
| Therapist: | So it’s really a very clever assignment from that angle. |
The client puts up no objection and actually completes three fifths of the assignment for the next session held a week later.
In Example 2, the therapist appropriates the pronoun “we,” drawing on her affiliation with an entire learned body of practitioners, from Freud on, when she instructs the client “We don’t believe you forget anything. … It’s all in there,” referring to the unconscious. The client attempts to dispute the therapist’s interpretation three times with “no” or not, then falls silent after a feeble “Well” in the face of the vociferous claim to science by the therapist.
| Client: | I thought most of today that I had so much to tell you.… Now I’m here! I don’t have much else to (.) tell you. | |
| Therapist: | Do you think it’s the tape? | |
| Client: | No: I had forgotten about the tape. | |
| Therapist: | Hm. | |
| Client: | No. I had forgotten about it. | |
| → | Therapist: | But you see, we don’t believe you forget. Remember. … We’ve worked together long enough. You ought to know what I believe about the unconscious. The unconscious doesn’t forget. It’s all in there. |
| Client: | My conscious didn’t know it. | |
| Therapist: | Well, I think it probably does have something to do with why you feel funny about what’s to say. That’s my guess. | |
| Client: | Well (6). |
Examples 3 and 4 illustrate the role of jargon in giving therapists the upper hand. Although every specialized field has its jargon, it is notable that psychology has penetrated the popular culture to such an extent that the person on the street is familiar with dozens of major psychology concepts. My data indicate that clients from both the working and middle class utilize psychological jargon adroitly in their sessions. Nonetheless, there is a proprietary tendency by therapists to define and explain concepts even when their clients avow knowledge of the terms. Notice in Example 3 that the male therapist defines the term autistic even though the client says, “Yeah,” he knows the term. Recorded discourse previous to this extract reveals that both the client and the therapist know that the client is fixated on pedophilic fantasies and has been treated by a psychiatrist in another state. Nevertheless, the therapist defines the two underlined terms autistic and fixated.
Gergen (1994) observes that a host of psychological items are “no longer professional property but are part of ‘what everybody knows’ in the cultural vernacular”; he gives the examples, “stress, depression, split personality, identity crisis, midlife crisis, PMS” (p. 158). More frighteningly, as the culture absorbs the argot of the profession, Gergen (1994) points out:
the role of the professional is both strengthened and threatened. If the client has already identified the problem, in the professional language, and is sophisticated about therapeutic procedures (as is true in many cases), then the status of the professional is placed in jeopardy. (p. 16)
When a psychological term becomes common sense, professionals must reclaim knowledge, couch it in science, and technologize the term in order to reassert the authority and justification for their claim to specialized knowledge. Gergen (1995, p. 153) gives the example of the development of technical definitions of depression in order to reconstitute depression as an object of professional knowledge. We can see this at work in Example 4, which is examined again later in another context. Here the therapist is at pains to define depression, although she is speaking to a client with a Ph.D. who has read widely in psychology.
| Client: | I can’t get out of my system how angry I am at them. | |
| Therapist: | Good! That’s what I want you to recognize, that this is all connected up with anger. You are furious. | |
| …… | ||
| And it makes you so angry that you get—I think I think you hurt yourself is what I think happens when you get angry. | ||
| → | ((sniff)) (5) Maybe to save them? (1) See, that’s essentially what depression is: is it’s hurting oneself to spare others, taking it in, letting it eat you, corrode you from the inside out so that you can still be nice to others out there in the world. They won’t hurt to be. You will not visit your grief on them. Well, I think you try so hard to do that. When it comes out here now, so we’re getting somewhere. |
Strategy 2: Metalinguistic Commentary on the Proper Use of Language
The second practice that contributes to the construction of language incompetence is the therapist’s metalinguistic commentary on the proper use of language. This strategy is particularly troubling for its implications of inferiority and language deficiency. Frequently, therapists complain about ambiguity; or implicitly invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (the belief that language influences thought) with undereducated clients; or deny the labeling of the clients, forcing them to abandon their words and accept the “correct” form provided by the therapist. When therapists offer metalinguistic commentary on the client’s use of language it sends a critical message that they are superior and the client is somehow less capable. Consider Example 5. Here the therapist accuses the client of using pronouns in an ambiguous way, something that all speakers do. This client is blue-collar with aspirations for upward mobility, and may be particularly vulnerable to claims of superiority in language.
Example 5 (Proper use of pronouns)
In Example 6, the therapist, dealing with the same working-class client, implicitly invokes a notion familiar to many readers but not necessarily to the average person, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He does not name the hypothesis but instructs the client that he would like her to ask her lover about his reactions to her weight. He says at the first arrow, “I’d like you to ask it verbatim.” After a 1-second pause he paraphrases verbatim, “you know, like I’m saying,” indicating his doubt about her lexicon. He then says, “In fact, I think I’m gonna write it down so I can have you ask it in the exact words.”
That there is a metalinguistic gap present becomes apparent when the client interprets the reason for his giving written instructions as “so I don’t forget it.” The mismatch in intentions for the “exact words” is negotiated in an exchange when the therapist explains, at the second arrow, “sometimes a single word can make a difference.” His assumption, implicitly the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language may affect thought, is not fully appreciated by the client even by the end of the hour. At the third arrow the therapist scolds the client for speaking “in a rather vague manner” and again points out that her pronouns don’t seem clearly related to anything, providing a lesson in language inferiority.
Example 6 (Implicit Sapir–Whorf hypothesis)
Strategy 3: Reauthoring of Emotions
Coulter (1979) points out a phenomenon called reauthoring of emotions and observes that we can “intelligibly suggest to people that they abandon certain emotions on rational grounds, that we can argue them out of their anger, shame, embarrassment, disappointment, fear, etc.” (p. 129). A particularly lucid and compelling account of how multiple voices attempt to reauthor the emotion of fear is Capps and Ochs’ (1995) account of Constructing Panic. Observe in Example 7 how reality is personally negotiable through the relabeling of emotions. The therapist asks at the arrow, “Are there any other words … that would describe the feeling?” He wants the female client to relabel “weaker” as “caring” but, as shown at the first dot, the client expresses her reticence and objects that to her the two feelings are similar. The therapist insists on his view that the two are quite different. This example is especially notable if we examine the client’s five feeble attempts to maintain her own point of view. As shown with dots, she objects with two turns of “I don’t know,” one “but,” and two “wells,” along with stating that “weaker” and “caring” are the same. Given Pomerantz’ (1984) well-supported findings of the preference for agreement, these five prefaces to disagreement are considerable and suggest coercion. Here again the notion that a single word can make a difference is expressed.
Example 7 (Sapir–Whorf and reauthoring)
1) Mm I don’t know. They’re confused so I don’t know ((upset)).In contrast, Anderson and Goolishian’s (1992) proposed “not-knowing approach” means, according to Shotter (1993) an
adoption by the therapist of both a way or method of listening to what clients say and also a special way of responding to it, a sustained attitude which “invites” clients to try to say what their world is like to them rather than as in everyday life where we struggle to institute our form of life in the face of other peoples’. (p. 120)
Therapists who silence the clients’ realities, effectively coercing rather than coaxing them to disown their feelings, constrain the clients’ ability to know themselves as they attempt to change. By privileging their own perceptions and legitimizing only their notions, therapists may fail to recognize the power of interpersonally negotiating lived realities and different ways of knowing.
Strategy 4: Use of Hypothetical Dialogue, Speaking for the Other
We turn now to a fourth way in which the therapist authors the words and thoughts of the client in a critical manner. In this section we examine the creation of hypothetical dialogue, in which the therapist speaks as if he were the client, literally putting words in the client’s mouth, taking on a presumed voice and taking away the voice of the client. This may serve the purpose of allowing the client to become an observer of her own linguistic functioning, splitting the self into an experiencer and an observer. The therapist appropriates the client’s own internal voice for the purpose of public appraisal. This appraisal is invariably negative, holding the client’s words up for critique, thus adding to linguistic incompetence.
In Example 8, the therapist and client have been discussing the topic of the client’s warring sides, her strong/weak dichotomy. At the first arrow, the therapist takes on the voice of the client and expresses aloud his assessment of what her thoughts are. He takes on her presumed thoughts: “I’m not sure when one’s gonna pop up or.” At the second arrow he speaks for the client as if he were inside her head when he says, “So that rather than saying, ‘Golly this is really interesting, I have … these two different parts of me’ … you kinda go, ‘Oh no: I’m acting weird again and it means I’m crazy.’” The client’s response to this, prefaced by “Well,” shows less than ready acceptance of the therapist’s appropriation of her voice.
Example 8 (Hypothetical dialogue)
In Example 9, taken from a different dyad, the female therapist expresses aloud what she assumes the client was thinking at a particular juncture when she wanted to call her therapist after hours but was afraid of becoming a nuisance.
Example 9 (Hypothetical dialogue)
| Client: | But I did catch you at a bad time. I’m sure, Monday. (2) Ah (6) (It was I guess) this was Wednesday that I talked to you. | |
| Therapist: | So again you’re wrestling with some real mixed feeling about me. You think of me and turn to me when you’re feeling some stress. You want to make a call, want to have a word with me | |
| → | about some things. You fight off that. “I should learn to (.) steel myself and if I just wait a little longer this impulse will pass.” | |
| Client: | Yeah because I don’t know whether you’re gonna get mad or not. … |
Similarly, in Example 10 the same therapist speaks the presumed inner thoughts of the client, “They didn’t really want to know. See, I tried,” at the third arrow. In this segment the therapist also uses the fifth strategy (to be discussed) to connect past and present situations in which communication was problematic for the client. The client’s family and present bosses all communicate badly. At the first and second arrows in Example 10, the therapist voices a presumed family motto, speaking for the client and her parents, “Don’t tell me anything personal” and “Don’t want to know.” At the third arrow the therapist follows by appropriating the inner voice of the client, speaking as if she were the client.
Example 10 (Hypothetical dialogue and recycling communicative failure)
| Client: | …What I felt that Tom started doing after that conversation was what I saw going on in my family. They don’t argue openly, they don’t criticize openly, they don’t do anything openly, just just simply don’t deal. You know, whether it’s not have time to make assignments or not have time to critique them (.) um. | |
| Therapist: | They avoid feelings. | |
| Client: | Yeah, they avoid (.) them. | |
| Therapist: | They avoid FEELINGS. They avoid uh sexual feelings, close | |
| → | feelings, personal revelations. “Don’t tell me,” you know, is is the message in your family. “Don’t tell me anything personal.”((laugh)) | |
| Client: | Might as well be. | |
| → | Therapist: | “Don’t want to know.” And you told him. (3) Told him, and he’s coming on like your family. And maybe you picked (.) well (.) I think you were caught tsk ((noise next door)) |
| Client: | What? Maybe I picked what? | |
| → | Therapist: | Maybe you picked well who you would tell. He confirms the whole dynamic for you (.) so nicely (.) by turning away from |
| → | you when you do tell. How depressing. We’re back there. “They didn’t really want to know. See, I tried.” Uh. It’s uh. They didn’t come through very well for you, that’s for sure. | |
| . . . |
Strategy 5: Recycling of Episodes of Communicative Failure
Last, a frequent theme of therapy clients is to recite past communicative failures with significant others. Therapists seize on these portrayals of inadequacy and recycle the topic of failures, resulting in a reinforcement of language inadequacy and the view of the therapist–client dyad as a way to learn more appropriate models of language use. This subtle conveyance of linguistic incompetence serves to sustain the client dependence on the therapist as a means to gain communicative competence.
In Example 11, three of the strategies previously discussed can be seen at once. We can observe (a) hypothetical dialogue; (b) jargon defined, perhaps unnecessarily; and (c) emphasis on poor communication as a recurrent theme. At the first arrow, the therapist gives voice to what the client has never uttered as if it were spoken aloud. She releases the pent-up frustration and resentment by giving it a linguistic basis in the privacy of the therapy hour. At the second arrow, the therapist draws parallels between maladjusted communication patterns at home and work with her comment, “Does this all sound like you know the the the synopsis of what went on in your house? (7) Poor communication.” At the third arrow, the therapist defines depression, as we have seen.
Example 12 is a segment that provides another instance of a therapist’s pointing out patterns of communicative failure. This extract illustrates the social construction of language incompetence by a multivoiced community. In it the client reveals that first his mother, then teachers, then fellow graduates from a deaf school (all references highlighted by boldface) contributed to the composite picture of language inadequacy, providing a lesson in inferiority. It is the case that the client has difficulty getting the timing right to interrupt or ask for clarification. However, as the literature in conversation analysis reveals (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), turn taking is hard not only for the hearing impaired but for everyone. Nonetheless, the facts are that this client is able to participate fully in psychotherapy, the talking cure. He is not so inadequate after all. By concentrating on the 5% language failures rather than reassuring the client, the therapist is perhaps underemphasizing the fact that the client has achieved numerous communicative successes, even in the face of disability—graduating from college, maintaining a job, having friends, and engaging in psychotherapy.
| Example 12 (Patterns of communicative failure) | |
| Client: | Well I would always feel extremely uncomfortable around people, uh very ((throat clear)) like I am not really ((throat clear)) capable of sharing. I guess my being hard of hearing has a lot to do with that, because it really is hard for me to understand other people, especially when there’re three or four following around. An uh (2) I suppose very early in my life I was taught that it’s very rude to interrupt when someone is talking. Uh I remember my mother would put up her hand like this in the form of a three,∗ which means “Be quiet. I am talking.” |
| Therapist: | How did she get that? |
| Client: | I haven’t the vaguest idea. But she did that only— ever since when I was very young, very young, so I haven’t even given it a thought (.) to that. But she always said “Be quiet. I am talking.” “Now be quiet. Mother is talking.” |
| Therapist: | Hm. |
| Client: | I remember one time that I— see more than a few times I got I used to get. I wanted to say something. She would hold up my hand like this. I wanted to reach out and just grab her fingers. |
| Therapist: | Very very angry about that. Yes, telling you to shut up in a sense. And you were just trying to understand what people were saying to you. |
| Client: | Yeah. |
| Therapist: | And that’s what— by interrupting you would be able to get some clarification on what they were saying. |
| Client: | Yeah |
| Therapist: | Now you seem to do that with me quite okay. |
| Client: | Oh yeah. I don’t. I think like I can do that fairly well, not nearly as crippling as it used to be. |
| Therapist: | Mmhm. |
| Client: | But I remember when I was uh (.) I used to have teacher tell me uh, “Don’t be afraid to tell me to uh speak up louder if you can’t read, uh hear me. So I’d say, well then I’d interrupt to tell her to speak up louder and after a while they get very irritated |
| Therapist: | yeah |
| Client: | because you’re doing it. So the teachers, they don’t figure. And I’ve got more than a few negative feedbacks. |
| . . . . . | |
| Therapist: | Hm but I can see how you were crippled and very very hurt by that. |
| Client: | Just recently though uh a bunch of kids who are X [deaf institute] alumni I uh met over at Christy’s place, just about, oh yeah, this Sunday. And uh I was uh X, graduated from X but anyway, alumni. So she invited me over there. They were all manually responding and something like that. And uh I just sat there on the edge of the group and watched their hands. Several times Christy asked me, “Uh, can you understand all this?” |
| Therapist: | Mmhm. |
| Client: | I said, “yeah, yeah” But I’m not really. I wasn’t really understanding all this. And (1) finally after the meeting was over and everybody got up, went away, you know, Christy said she was just trying to do me a favor. She noted that I had a lot of good ideas for the uh alumni. But I didn’t enjoy. She was disappointed I didn’t get very much involved |
| Therapist: | Mm |
| Client: | uh and with the group, you know. I didn’t seem too worried about that. I just stayed away. You know, the’re all manual. |
| Therapist: | Why were you holding back? |
| Client: | Uh (2) I guess I was still a little afraid of them. You know, they were, all communicate manual. My manual sign is very bad. So just try to listen. I didn’t want to seem like an ass, uh, dumb cluck, you know like that. |
| Therapist: | Well, that’s the kind of feeling you had when you were a child with the people that were uh (.) normal in hearing. |
| Client: | Yeah |
| Therapist: | And now you have it with the people who are deaf— who use the manual sign. |
| Client: | Right. |
| Therapist: | Same phenomenon. Different uh aspect. ((laugh)) |
| Client: | Extreme kind of reverse now. |
| Therapist: | Reversed, yes. Uh huh. But you didn’t want to speak up and tell them uh you didn’t want to express yourself that you had trouble with your confidence of uh your manual signs. |
| Client: | uh huh |
The preceding example illustrates that we live in and through the discursive identities we develop in conversation with one another. One purpose of psychotherapy is to explore the relativity of these realities.
SUMMARY
In summary, the field of psychotherapy, as practiced in the foregoing examples, has sufficient opportunity to reexamine its tenets and to question its role in contributing to the discursive construction of language incompetence. Exemplified above are five practices that diminish clients and their language abilities. These are:
1. The creation of the expert-to-novice stance
2. Metalinguistic commentary on the proper use of language at the client’s expense
3. Reauthoring of emotions
4. The manufacture of hypothetical dialogue where the therapist speaks as if he/she had entered the mind of the client and were voicing his or her words
5. Recycling episodes of communicative failure.
HOPEFUL SIGNS FOR THE FUTURE
To conclude on a positive note and demonstrate that there is hope, we can report several signs of change on the horizon. If therapists do not yet fully recognize their role in the social construction of language incompetence, we can still draw inspiration from two facts: A few researchers/practitioners have begun lecturing, publishing, practicing and demonstrating discursive psychology (see Edwards & Potter, 1992) and their influence is growing. Another point is that clients themselves are being educated in the role that social construction plays in their lives. Some are also voicing their concern about the social construction that may devalue them, characterize their words as scarcely adequate, and move them to silence (Gergen, 1995, p. 153) while others assert their superiority and justify their role as models of the good life.
An encouraging illustration of the second point can be seen in Example 13, in which the client, in her own words, explains to her therapist what social construction is and how she sees herself as possibly contributing to the picture others may have of her. We can hope that if clients are this enlightened about the role that a culture and its members, as well as the individual self in interaction, play in the construction of reality and the social self, then therapists will not be far behind.
The therapist here shows interest in understanding what the client has to say about social construction.
CONCLUSION
Finally, we can agree with Gergen (1994, p. 147) that the “ways we talk” are intimately intertwined with patterns of cultural life. They sustain and support certain ways of doing things and prevent others from emerging. Representatives of institutions, in particular, have a responsibility to recognize the role of social construction of reality and to actively use this force for self-enhancing rather than self-denigrating purposes. Rather than stifling and supplanting clients’ voices or moving them to silence, therapists should acknowledge to themselves and their clients their mutual complicity in the complex construction of self through language. With the “not-knowing approach” advocated by Anderson and Goolishian (1992), therapists can facilitate a climate for change in which receptivity to explore multiple viewpoints underscores the acceptance of the relativity of meaning. The present study furthers the small but growing tradition of discursive psychology, underscores concepts of the co-construction of social realities, and contributes to a discourse-centered ethnography of communication by elucidating practices in a little-studied discourse community, psychotherapy.
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∗The sign or hand gesture referred to (the thumb and little finger bent to touch with 3 middle fingers held erect) is widely used by Brownies and Girl Scouts to signal respectful turn taking. It is perhaps a gesture more familiar to females than males.