Therapeutic Ways with Words (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) [Paperback]

Kathleen Warden Ferrara (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195083385 | ISBN-13: 978-0195083385 | Publication Date: April 7, 1994

Therapeutic Ways with Words provides a unique glimpse into language use in psychotherapy, an important speech event which has previously been shrouded in mystery. This important book shows how both clients and therapists accomplish their aims through language, which, paradoxically, is both the method of diagnosis and the medium of treatment in this cultural practice. With a discourse analysis of tape recordings and transcripts of actual psychotherapy sessions enhanced by a variety of ethnographic observations, Kathleen Warden Ferrara explores the skillful and creative uses of language in the complicated speech event of psychotherapy. Shedding light on discourse practices such as retellings of personal experience narrative, jointly constructed sentences and metaphorical extensions, and strategic uses of repetition, the study emphasizes the interactive nature of all discourse and shows how language is mutually constructed as people interweave pieces of their own and others' sentences, metaphors, and narratives.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ferrara's scholarship is not just sound, but creative; not just up-to-date, but up to the minute. She offers insightful treatments of data just begging for attention in light of recent developments in discourse analysis, and thus contributes cutting-edge results. Her work represents the kind of research we need much more of in linguistics today."--Neal Norrick, Northern Illinois University

"A contribution to the field of sociolinguistics."--Language

About the Author

Kathleen Warden Ferrara is at Texas AandM University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 7, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195083385
• ISBN-13: 978-0195083385
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,833,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is an interesting book, February 12, 1998

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This review is from: Therapeutic Ways with Words (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) (Paperback)

This review of K. Ferrara (1994), Therapeutic Ways with Words. appeared in Discourse & Society 7:563-64. (1996), reviewed by Malcah Yaeger-Dror. KATHLEEN WARDEN FERRARA. Therapeutic Ways with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. x+ 199 pp. $45.00 (hbk) $18.95 (pbk) The book under review is a new addition to an Oxford series of 'significant treatments of [a] discourse [register] (vii), and focuses on therapeutic discourse. Although we would expect there already to be a large corpus of linguistic/ discourse literature on the 'talking cure', in actuality, the relevant discourse literature is sparse. This book has set itself two principle goals: *The author wants to describe the speech event of psychotherapy from an ethnographic perspective, focusing on the use of specific strategies in our culture's therapy. Given that the author is well grounded in the ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1964), and uses that theoretical framework, her research ideally suits the needs of a journal concerned with variation in both discourse and society; she highlights the ties between the discourse regularities she uncovers and the societal goals for the register, while demonstrating ways in which the methodological techniques might be used effectively to discover radically different discourse patterns in other societies. *The author also uses the data to address specific issues in the analysis of discourse. The text is empirically well-grounded, using 48 hours of naturally occurring individual therapy sessions, several therapy sessions by each of 4 experienced therapists (and two therapists-in-training), with troubled, but basically ordinary, Americans from the SouthWest of the United States (Texas and Oklahoma). While her actual corpus consists of these data, in addition, she has made impressive use of material she gathered from how-to texts for trainee therapists, newsletters for professionals, & tapes of other forms of therapeutic discourse (training sessions, group therapy sessions, & suicide prevention hotlines). The introduction discusses the practical and moral issues involved in collecting a corpus of this type, providing a helpful perspective for anyone who considers a similar or complimentary analysis. The study is methodologically innovative, adopting techniques from 'traditional' sociolinguistics, as well as from conversational analysis and other subdisciplines, to portray a coherent picture of how speech is used therapeutically by professionals, and how it is jointly constructed by client and patient. Her analysis shows that her conclusions are based on Labovian techniques to minimalize the observer's paradox (1972), complemented by Gumperz's technique of incorporating participants' own conclusions where useful (1982). The author then compares the use of specific techniques in therapy sessions, with reports by other authors of how they are used in other registers or in other societies. Several chapters of the book are of special interest to the readers of this journal: Chapter 2 discusses how psychotherapy differs from conversation and other speech events, using seven clear parameters of analysis. Chapters 3-7 discuss 5 specific discourse strategies at greater length: personal narratives --and their repetition (§3), dream-telling and interpretation (§4), repetition (§5), metaphor (§6) and sentence-splicing (§7). §3 shows that both interlocutors use retelling of specific narratives to make different analytical points, and explores this evidence as it impinges on the participants' understanding of what is 'reportable' within the setting. §4 shows ways in which the social import of the dreams, and who is authorized to tell and interpret, them are culturally bound phenomena. §5 contrasts different forms of contiguous repetition, and shows how repetition is manipulable within the subcultural situation for strategic social purposes: sentence 'echoing' by a client is shown to be both linguistically and strategically different from clausal 'mirroring' by a therapist, with the first demonstrating emphatic agreement and the latter a request for elaboration. Both show strategic use of 'mundane' repetitions can be put to institutional purposes. Using extensive examples from the corpus, §6 explores the symbolic uses of figurative language, showing that metaphor is culturally as well as individually and interactively produced. §7 specifically looks at the cases of joint production of sentences, and the purposes such coproductions are put to in this social situation; the chapter describes the syntactic junctures and interactional motivations for joint or collaborative turn production, describing four types of co-production of utterances: truth- enhancing extensions, predictable completions, helpful completions, and invited completions. The most interesting, perhaps, are the prosodic techniques used to 'invite' completion by the interlocutor in our society, and the reasons why this strategy might be especially useful in the institutional situation under analysis. The chapter also touches on the reaction of speakers from different cultural background (e.g., positive and negative politeness cultures) to such collaboration. While the analysis itself is limited to institutional co-productions in a (relatively) negative-polite culture, hints of the relevance for cross-cultural comparisons are found in the chapter [e.g., 'Are certain speakers, such as males...or those with certain cultural styles more likely to continue an utterance?' (p. 151)], and in notes [e.g., '...we might determine how the the interpretation of talk by cospeakers differs from culture to culture as well as from setting to setting.' (p. 183, fn. 27).] In short, while all the chapters are relevant to analysis of discourse from a societal perspective, the seventh should be of special interest. All these chapters illustrate that a comprehensive understanding of discourse requires a microanalytical study of a given speech event and its context. The afterward makes a plea for further studies of this particular institutional use of talk, and how talking can be used therapeutically in a given society, as well as to illuminate the uses of talk in society. The book is of interest to all those interested in understanding variation in discourse 'rules' within Western society, and across different societies, by laying the groundwork for analysis of the linguistic, paralinguistic, and societal variables relevant to any such study. Bibliography Gumperz, John (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hymes, Dell (1964) Introduction: towards ethnographies of communication. In J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, (eds) The ethnography of communication. American Anthropologist 66 (6) 1-34. Labov, William (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.