Introduction

This chapter examines a counselling psychology psychotherapy session and reports on how the therapist occasionally produces turns that correct, or more generally offer alternative words for, just-prior expressions produced by the client. These proposals may rephrase something that the client has said in a contrasting way or in a more explicit way.

This chapter, in common with other contributions to this book, draws on conversation analysis (CA). Specifically, it draws on CA work on the organization of repair to show that, structurally, some of the corrections used are amongst the stronger forms of repair types that occur in talk. Although such choices might appear unexpected in psychotherapy, the analysis shows how these repair formats are in fact appropriate to certain tasks within the psychotherapeutic session; in particular encouraging the client to talk more explicitly and openly about her feelings (the client in the data I will present is female, and the therapist is male). Two dimensions can be identified in talk that recomposes just-prior talk: a dimension that corrects that prior talk and a dimension that shows an understanding of it. Both these dimensions may be present in the therapist's articulation of alternative ways of saying things: he displays that he is monitoring the client closely, but he also suggests that the client should express her feelings more explicitly. I compare and contrast the use of such proposals with talk that challenges or disagrees with things that the client says.