ABSTRACT
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.
