A Study Of Psychological Counselor’s Pragmatic Strategies In Empathy

Nowadays with the rapid life pavement and intense competition, many people are burdening much mental pressure which results in all kinds of psychological problems. These problems will not only affect personal health, but also do harm to the family happiness and social harmony. Psychological counseling, emerging as a response to the needs of a healthy society, can help people better control their emotional states and stimulate their consciousness of self awareness and potential. As people and the society pay more attention to mental health, the industry of psychological counseling develops fast in our country. Psychological counseling is "talk cure". The counselor leads the talk through language in order to achieve therapeutic effect. In this process, the counselor must use certain pragmatic strategies. Many researches show that a warm, agreeable and credible therapeutic relationship is a priority to achieve good therapeutic effect in all forms of psychological counseling. To establish this kind of relationship, empathy plays a vital role. Counselor empathy refers to the sensibility and willingness of the counselor to understand the client’s thoughts, feelings and struggles from the client’s point of view. It is the ability to perceive the internal frame of reference with another with accuracy. It is also an intellectual and emotional process in which the counselor interpret the present moods and feelings of the client, and effectively convey his or her understanding to the client. Although the research of counselor empathy has aroused the attention of scholars in various fields and many researches have been carried out, research from the perspective of linguistics is sill very rare. So, setting language data of real psychological counseling interview as research object, combining theories of linguistics and psychology, this study makes a research on the specific pragmatic strategies which counselor use to convey empathy in the process of psychological counseling.The data in this study is collected from university mental health centre, TV psychological counseling program and cases in professional psychological books. With the theoretical framework of language adaptation theory, method of qualitative research and interpretational research, the writer analyzed the collected data and extracted the language segment of counselor empathy to form a smaller language corpus. Through analysis and induction of these data, the writer summarized the pragmatic strategies counselor use to convey empathy:conveying empathy through certain deixis according to specific context; conveying empathy through formulation; conveying empathy through presupposed questions. Theoretically, this study makes a research of the pragmatic strategies in counselor empathy, setting psychological counseling language which is a special institutional language as research object, and is expected to enrich the linguistic theory of psychological counseling discourse as well as pragmatic theory of institutional discourse. In a practical sense, this study may provide some reference for psychological counselors in therapeutic process to improve their level and strategy of empathy conveying, thus to promote the therapeutic relationship between them and the clients. Besides, the research result of this study may benefit people in terms of interpersonal communication, for the application of these pragmatic strategies of empathy into daily communication would play an active role in improving efficiency of conversation and establishing good relationships with others.