A Study On The Pragmatic Features Of Chinese Psychotherapeutic Discourse

Psychotherapy, defined as the "talking cure" and much dependent on effective therapeutic relationship, is a discursive practice in which a trained professional psychotherapist helps the client manage or relieve the problems or barriers by employing psychotherapeutic theories and techniques so as to ensure the healthy and congruous character development of the client. Psychotherapeutic discourse is the totality of various therapeutic knowledge, therapeutic theories, therapeutic models, therapeutic techniques, therapeutic terms and therapeutic practice. The importance of discourse in psychotherapeutic practice makes it a significant field in counseling research and practice.Western studies on psychotherapeutic discourse, which started very early, tend to be pluralistic. They are conducted either from psychological or from social and linguistic perspectives and cover a wide range of subjects, including psychotherapeutic discourse strategies, the role and power in psychotherapeutic interviews, the process and regular patterns of interaction, and even the particular speech acts in the conversation. Recently corpus-based discourse analysis has become the mainstream research methodology of western studies and the research paradigm has been gradually shifted from single qualitative-based research to a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. The main weaknesses of western studies are the lack of large-scale corpus research and little concern for the client’s discursive behavior. In contrast, domestic studies on psychotherapeutic discourse, especially those from linguistic perspective, are just beginning, which mainly include the psychological study of discourse techniques (especially about questioning techniques), and the linguistic study of discourse structures, speech acts, cooperative principle, discursive power, discourse strategies, discourse genres and so on. The main problems with domestic psychotherapeutic discourse research are:much emphasis on psychotherapy outcome research, but little on psychotherapy process research; much emphasis on strategies (i.e. conversational skills), but little on objective description and interpretation; much emphasis on therapists’language, but little on clients’ language; much emphasis on qualitative research, but less on quantitative research. Up to date, there is no one who has ever conducted corpus-based study of the discursive practice in psychotherapy from the perspective of discourse analysis. Therefore, there is urgent need to intensify and expand domestic studies in this area.Based on the theories of discourse analysis, the Principle of Goal, the Cooperative Principle and therapeutic relationship, this thesis conducts a research on the pragmatic features of psychotherapeutic discourse, which include:question-response interaction, exchange structure, formulation and presupposition mechanism of questions. This research aims to unpack the therapeutic process of talk-in-interaction, present the pragmatic features of psychotherapeutic discourse and reveal the underlying cooperative and power relationship so as to deepen people’s understanding of psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic relationship, compensate for the weaknesses of psychotherapeutic discourse research and finally provide some enlightenment for linguistic study and the development of counseling practice. The data used for this research is transcribed from the tape-recordings of 20 psychotherapeutic interview sessions from the outpatient departments in South China hospitals amounting to more than 200,000 words. All the interview types are individual therapy and include both the early and later sessions of some cases for comparative study. Besides, the therapists in all interview sessions have adopted a comprehensive therapeutic approach which takes the client-centered theory as the primary and other theories as secondary. With a combination of qualitative description and quantitative analysis, this research follows a four-step procedure:firstly, observe the psychotherapeutic discourse and talk-in-interaction; secondly, give an objective description of some pragmatic feature in the corpus; thirdly, present explanations from multi-dimensions and multi-perspectives; finally, provide enlightenment for linguistic study and counseling practice.The research shows that in psychotherapeutic talk-in-interaction, the congruent super goal relationship between the therapist and the client, which is formed at the moment when the client seeks help from the therapist, ensures a high degree of cooperation between them. As a result of the typical helper-helpee therapeutic relationship and the congruence of the super goal relationship, the sub-goal relationship at different stages of psychotherapeutic process is mostly congruent. Therefore, generally speaking, there is a high degree of cooperation between the therapist and the client at all stages of the therapeutic process. But there is also confliction between the sub-goals of the therapist and the client when the client avoids the therapist’s questions and shows unwillingness to cooperate or low degree of cooperation by keeping silence, not giving the expected answer or shifting the topic in order to defend himself, to justify his mind and behavior or to save his face. These conflicting goal-relationships are the impediments in psychotherapeutic interaction. What’s more, cooperation and intervention forms a unity in psychotherapeutic interaction, in which cooperation is the end and intervention is the means. The purpose of the therapist’s intervention is to promote cooperation. The degree of cooperation between the therapist and the client determines the quality of therapeutic relationship and further affects the therapeutic process and outcome. Therapeutic relationship is a reflection of discursive power relationship in psychotherapeutic interaction. The research findings show that the therapist and the client establishes an asymmetrical discursive power relationship in psychotherapeutic talk-in-interaction, which results from the asymmetry in the therapist’s and client’s innate role power, societal power and historical power, and also from the asymmetry in dynamic power-from-within, power-with and power-over in interaction. However, the asymmetrical discursive power relationship between the therapist and the client is not static and stable, but dynamic and developing. More importantly, such asymmetry will damage the therapeutic relationship and affect the therapeutic process and outcome. In view of all the findings above, we finally advance a comprehensive analysis framework for psychotherapeutic discourse. That is, the pragmatic study of psychotherapeutic discourse should be placed in a complicated multi-angular, multi-dimensional and multi-functional network, which should include goal relationship, discursive power relationship, therapeutic relationship, cooperation and intervention, talk-in-interaction, linguistic study and the counseling practice.The main contributions of this research are reflected in the following theoretical and practical aspects. Theoretically, a linguistic perspective is adopted in the empirical study of psychotherapeutic discourse based on the corpus transcribed from psychotherapeutic interview sessions of outpatient departments for the first time in China, which also enriches and develops western studies on psychotherapeutic discourse, especially on the interaction between participants and on the client’s discursive practice; the applicability of the Principle of Goal is tested and verified in the research fields of psychotherapeutic discourse, which illustrates how the participants (especially the therapist) adopts particular discourse strategies and devices to achieve the super-goal and the sub-goals of psychotherapy; the power nature of discourse is further fortified in the study of psychotherapeutic discourse, which reveals the asymmetrical discursive power relationship between the participants in psychotherapeutic talk-in-interaction. Practically, both the therapist and the client can gain a deep understanding of their own roles, status and power in psychotherapeutic interaction, and especially the therapist is able to examine the present therapeutic relationship carefully so as to establish effective therapeutic relationship with different clients at different stages of the therapeutic process; the therapist can improve his discursive practice through effective questions types, reasonable number of questions, appropriate patterns and types of exchange structures, increased responses to the client’s discourse, proper formulations and tactic presupposition of questions so that a more cooperative environment and a more effective therapeutic relationship are built to change the asymmetry of discursive power relationship; the client can improve his discursive practice through initiating more questions and exchange structures, giving more responses and joining in the collaborative formulations so that he can enhance his subjectivity, strengthen his power-from-within and finally make a positive difference.All in all, this research has revealed the cooperation and asymmetrical discursive power relationship between the therapist and the client through empirical study of the pragmatic features of psychotherapeutic discourse, which helps to promote the cooperation between the therapist and the client, eliminate the asymmetry of power and finally establish an effective therapeutic relationship characterized by equality, interactivity and cooperativeness.