ABSTRACT
Ask psychotherapists (i.e., mental health counselors, family therapists, psychologists, clinical social workers, or psychiatrists) what it is they do when they work with patients or clients and their answers will be varied and usually rich with psychological and sociological theory, pathological diagnoses, and declarations about the therapeutic models that guide their practice, but talk about language will be absent.
It is a matter for astonishment, when one comes to think of it, how little use linguistics and other sciences of language are to psychiatrists. When one considers that the psychiatrist spends most of his [or her] time listening and talking to patients, one might suppose that there would be such a thing as a basic science of listening-and-talking, as indispensable to psychiatrists as anatomy to surgeons. Surgeons traffic in body structures. Psychiatrists traffic in words. (Percy, 1954/1987, p. 159)
