Abstract

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This study investigates the interactional unfolding of therapist-initiated resonating in Chinese psychotherapeutic interactions. By ‘resonating’ we refer to a recurrent conversational phenomenon that one speaker repeatedly reproduces selected aspects of another speaker which index the selected material and mobilize responses from the original speaker. Previous research has shown that speakers resonate to achieve different communicative goals in discourse (Clark 1996), such as stance management (Siromma 2012; Poldvere & Paradis 2017), inter-subjectivity enhancement (Du Bois et al., 2014; Nir et al, 2017), topic management (Laury 2010) and etc. The pragmatic study of resonating in institutional settings, especially its pivotal role in negotiation of participants’ epistemic status has been under-researched.

To address this research gap, the present study aims at scrutinizing the interactional unfolding of therapist-initiated resonating in Chinese therapeutic interactions. More specifically, the study shows how the therapist resonates to index and resolve interactional troubles. Although therapists carry the professional authority, clients have expertise in relation to their life experience (Ekberg & LeCouteur 2015). This epistemic environment may cause troubles when therapists give suggestions or take a directive role in how clients might solve their problems. In this specific context, interactional troubles are mainly related to the moments in which progressivity of the therapeutic interaction is affected by observable orientations to the timing (long silence) or nature (e.g. the clients’ persistence with their problematic epistemic claim). Data come from a corpus of more than 60 hours of audio-recorded naturally-occurring dyadic therapeutic interactions from a Chinese hospital. A preliminary analysis reveals that therapist-initiated resonating is found to perform the following actions. 1) Problematizing the troubles. Through sequences of resonating, the therapist implicitly indexes the potential interactional troubles. 2) Mobilizing responses from the client. When long silence occurs due to the clients’ unwillingness or inability to respond in a second pair part, the sequential organization shows that resonating prompts the client to respond. 3) Co-constructing epistemic knowledge. Initiated by therapist-initiated resonating or resonating sequences, the client’s problematic “epistemic of experience” is challenged by the therapist’s “epistemic of expertise”, and the client’s epistemic status shift emerges during the process of dynamic co-constructing. The study contributes to the therapist’s expertise and interactional strategy in managing interactional troubles and the accomplishment of institutional goals.

Key words: psychotherapeutic interactions, resonating, epistemic status, negotiation, conversation analysis