ABSTRACT
Clients in therapy convey psychological meaning through the sounds of their speech as well as their words. Words used in therapy are always embodied in a rich interpersonal and non-verbal context shared by the client and therapist. Therapy transcripts represent only the verbal text. Text-based research has proved useful, but many authors have lamented the restricted view it offers. In this chapter, we consider what may be learned by attending not only to the verbal content, but also to the speech sounds of clients in psychotherapy. To understand the relationship between content and sound, we used a theory of internal multiplicity called the assimilation model (Stiles 2002; Stiles et al. 1990). In this chapter, we review the assimilation model’s account of multiplicity and report a study in which we systematically examined internal multiplicity as manifested by content and sound in a therapy session.
