Item Details

Change in Family Therapy: Accomplishing Authoritative and Moral Positions through Interaction

Issue: Vol 16 No. 2 (2019) Special Issue: Understanding Change in Psychotherapy

Journal: Communication & Medicine

Subject Areas: Healthcare Communication Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/cam.34100

Abstract:

A fundamental theoretical premise in Structural Family Therapy (SFT) is that changes in individual members and improvements in intra-familial relations are realized by repairing the family structure. Dysfunctional families are conceptualized in terms of individuals taking on inappropriate roles (e.g., children acting as if they were parents) and the boundaries between parental executive levels and the children/sibling level are unclear, too rigid, or highly permeable. The therapist’s role is to temporarily engage (join) with family members in a way that generates in-session interactions that exemplify the desirable family structure. While the theory supporting these interventions are well developed, there has been little work done on explicating how such tasks may be interactively accomplished in clinical practice. Drawing from the methods of conversation analysis, our aim for this paper is to show how a master therapist in SFT accomplishes some of these transformations during a single therapy session. We focus on the discursive resources through which the therapist is able to readjust the role relationships between a mother and her daughter (i.e., in such a way that the mother can adopt a more agentive position vis-a-vis her children) and how the therapist’s actions indexed core SFT principles of restructuring the family.

Author: Peter Muntigl, Adam O. Horvath

View Full Text

References :

Aponte, Harry J. (1992) Training the person of the therapist in structural family therapy. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 18 (3): 269–281. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.1992.tb00940.x

Buttny, Richard (2004) Talking Problems: Studies of Discursive Construction. New York: State University of New York Press.

Couture, Shari J. (2006) Transcending a differend: Studying therapeutic processes conversationally. Contemporary Family Therapy 28 (3): 285–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-006-9011-1

Couture, Shari J. (2007) Multiparty talk in family therapy: Complexity breeds opportunity. Journal of Systemic Therapies 26 (1): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1521/jsyt.2007.26.1.63

Drew, Paul and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (2014) Requesting – From speech act to recruitment. In Paul Drew and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds) Requesting in Social Interaction, 1–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.26.01dre

Ekberg, Katie and Amanda LeCouteur (2015) Clients’ resistance to therapists’ proposals: Managing epistemic and deontic status. Journal of Pragmatics 90: 12–25. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.10.004

Fishman, H. Charles and Tana Fishman (2003) Structural family therapy. In G. Pirooz Sholevar and Linda D. Schwoeri (eds) Textbook of Family and Couples Therapy: Clinical Applications, 35–54. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Goffman, Erving (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hepburn, Alexa and Galina B. Bolden (2013) The conversation analytic approach to transcrip­tion. In Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, 57–76. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwellhttps://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325001.ch4

Hepburn, Alexa and Jonathan Potter (2007) Crying receipts: Time, empathy, and institutional pract­ice. Research on Language and Social Interaction 40 (1): 89–116. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810701331299

Heritage, John (2012) Epistemics in action: Action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2012.646684

Hutchby, Ian (2007) The Discourse of Child Counsel­ling. Amsterdam: John Benjaminshttps://doi.org/10.1075/impact.21

Hutchby, Ian and Michelle O’Reilly (2010) Children’s participation and the familial moral order in family therapy. Discourse Studies 12 (1): 49–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445609357406

Horvath, Adam O. and Peter Muntigl (2018) The alliance as a discursive achievement: A con­versation analytical perspective. In Olga Smoliak and Tom Strong (eds) Therapy as Discourse: Practice and Research, 71–93. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93067-1_4

Jefferson, Gail (1991) List construction as a task and resource. In George Psathas (ed.) Inter­actional Competence, 63–92. New York: Irvington Press.

Kendon, Adam (1990) Conducting Interaction: Patterns of Behaviour in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kirsch, David (1995) The intelligent use of space. Artificial Intelligence 73 (1–2): 31–68. https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-3702(94)00017-U

Levinson, Stephen (1988) Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s con­cepts of participation. In Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds) Erving Goffman: Exploring the Inter­action Order, 161–227. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lindström, Anna and Marja-Leena Sorjonen (2013) Affiliation in conversation. In Jack Sidnell and Tanya Stivers (eds) The Handbook of Conversa­tion Analysis, 350–369. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwellhttps://doi.org/10.1002/9781118325001.ch17

Minuchin, Salvador (1974) Families & Family Therapy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Minuchin, Salvador and Michael P. Nichols (1998) Structural family therapy. In Frank M. Dattilio (ed.) Case Studies in Couple and Family Therapy: Systemic and Cognitive Perspectives, 108–131. New York: Guilford Press.

Muntigl, Peter (2020) Managing distress over time in psychotherapy: Guiding the client in and through intense emotional work. Frontiers in Psychology 10: Art. 3052 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03052

Muntigl, Peter, Lynda Chubak and Lynne Angus (2017) Entering chair work in psychotherapy: An interactional structure for getting emotion-focused talk underway. Journal of Pragmatics 117: 168–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.06.016

Muntigl, Peter and Adam O. Horvath (2014) The therapeutic relationship in action: How therapists and clients co-manage relational disaffiliation. Psychotherapy Research 24 (3): 327–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2013.807525

Muntigl, Peter and Adam O. Horvath (2016) A conversation analytic study of building and repairing the alliance in family therapy. Journal of Family Therapy 38 (1): 102–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12109

Muntigl, Peter, Naomi Knight, Ashley Watkins, Adam O. Horvath and Lynne Angus (2013) Active retreating: Person-centered practices to repair disaffiliation in therapy. Journal of Pragmatics 53: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.019

Navarre, Suzanne E. (1998) Salvador Minuchin’s structural family therapy and its application to multicultural family systems. Issues in Mental Health Nursing 19 (6): 567–570. https://doi.org/10.1080/016128498248845

O’Reilly, Michelle (2014) Blame and accountability in family therapy: Making sense of therapeutic spaces discursively. Qualitative Psychology 1 (2): 163–177. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000011

O’Reilly, Michelle and Jessica Nina Lester (2016) Building a case for good parenting in a family therapy systemic environment: Resisting blame and accounting for children’s behavior. Journal of Family Therapy 38 (4): 491–511. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6427.12094

Pomerantz, Anita (1980) Telling my side: ‘Limited access’ as a ‘fishing’ device. Sociological Inquiry 50 (3–4): 186–198. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-682X.1980.tb00020.x

Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation (2 volumes), edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson (1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50 (4): 696–735. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.1974.0010

Schegloff, Emanuel A. (2007) Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791208

Stevanovic, Melisa and Jan Svennevig (2015) Intro­duction: Epistemics and deontics in con­versational directives. Journal of Pragmatics 78: 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.01.008

Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada and Jakob Steensig (2011) Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada and Jan Steensig (eds) The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, 3–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511921674.002

Stivers, Tanya and Federico Rossano (2010) Mobil­izing response. Research on Language and Social Interaction 43 (1): 3–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/08351810903471258

Sutherland, Olga and Shari Couture (2007) The discursive performance of the alliance in family therapy: A conversation analytic perspective. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 28 (4): 210–217. https://doi.org/10.1375/anft.28.4.210

Vetere, Arlene (2001) Structural family therapy. Child Psychology & Psychiatry Review 6 (3): 133–139. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360641701002672

Watzlawick, Paul and Don D. Jackson (2010) [1964] On human communication. Journal of Systemic Therapies 29 (2): 53–68. https://doi.org/10.1521/jsyt.2010.29.2.53