Discursive therapy?

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Discursive therapy?
Tom Strong Andy Lock
University of Calgary Massey University
We contend that the talk of therapy, like everyday talk, is where and how people construct their
understandings and ways of living. is is the fundamental insight of the social constructionist,
or discursive, therapies. ‘Meaning’ is not some pre-given ‘thing’ that is communicated more or
less successfully from one individual to another. Rather, ‘meanings’ are negotiated or constructed
in the process of communication until each party is clear that they have a grasp of what they are
‘talking about’. Similarly, ‘meanings’ are not universal, nor necessarily arranged in a given ethical
hierarchy, with some absolutely superior to others: ‘meanings’ are local and accountable in their
locality. Yet, meanings, and actions following from them, are central to the conversations of therapy.
In our view, the social constructionist or discursive therapies point to enhanced possibilities for
collaborative and relevant conversations with clients. In this article we summarize themes common
to contemporary discursive approaches to therapy (examples: narrative, solution-focused,
social and collaborative language systems therapies).
…within whose intralinguistic realities is
all this judging and correcting to be done?
—John Shotter, 1993, p. 141
For an endeavour that is largely based on conversation it might seem
obvious to suggest that therapy is discursive. After all, therapists and clients
use talk, or forms of discourse, as their primary means to accomplish psy-
chotherapeutic aims. But, in the relatively recent tradition of therapy, talk
or discourse has usually been seen as secondary to the actual business of
therapy—a necessary conduit for exchanging information between therapist
and client, but seldom more. erapy primarily developed, as have most
applied sciences (e.g., medicine and engineering), by mapping particular
experiential domains in ways responsive to human intervention. e role
that discourse plays in such mapping and intervening endeavours—whether
by scientists or lay folk—has only recently been recognized as a focus for
analysis and intervention. is recognition has Copernican implications,
and not only for therapy. It serves to remind us that the phenomena of our
experience cannot objectively announce their meanings and implications to
us. Talk is not a neutral ‘tool’ used to get ‘the real work’ done: talk is where
the real work of therapy happens (Friedman, 1993; Maranhão, 1986).
An increasing number of practitioners formulate therapy as a discursive
practice—as have other social researchers such as critical social psychologists,
Janus Head, 8(2), 585-593. Copyright © 2005 by Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY
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health psychologists, mediators, management consultants, etc., in their own
areas of interest. Discursive approaches to therapy place discourse or talk
central to the understandings and practices of therapy. is paradgimatic
development has been occurring for a number of reasons; most importantly,
because it is by using forms of discourse that we are able to understand
each other.
In most cases, the bases for these new formulations (examples: narrative,
solution-focused, social, and collaborative language systems therapies) are
commonly shared, though often with different emphases. It can, however,
be quite difficult to gain an understanding of those traditions that variously
contribute to these formulations. is is hardly surprising. e ideas inspiring
these therapies derive from often abstruse and arcane academic writing that
no practitioner really wants to be a scholar of: life is too short for that.
ere has recently been, however, a tendency to talk about the world
as if it has become a ‘post-modern’ or a ‘post-Enlightenment’ one (Toulmin,
1990). Most of those talking this way claim that ‘Truth’ is socially constructed
and relative to the time and place of its use. is starkly contrasts with the
‘modern’ approach of philosophers and scientists who sought (and continue
to seek) universal truths about ‘how things really are.’ Regardless, arguments
for a ‘post-’ point of view have found a growing currency within the human
sciences and services. ‘Psychiatric truths,’ for example, can be compellingly
analysed as suspect accounts of what is ‘really going on’; or they may be
characterised as ‘regimes of power’ (Foucault, 1984) rather than value-free
practices that follow from ‘what is clearly the case.’ Does this mean that
scientific medicine is all bad? at much of what it uses to inform its practice
is just relative? at you would want to go to a post-modern dentist?
Questions like the preceding seem to call for knockdown answers (see
Edwards, Ashmore & Potter, 1995) until one unpacks their presuppositions.
For example, a therapist’s inquiries or interventions can hardly be given
the same technological capacity as a dentist’s drill. Nor can one turn to the
social sciences for the certainties found in the natural sciences. inking
discursively is not a science- or technology-defying move; few postmoderns
are ready to give up their laptops or cell phones. Also, characterizing well-
intentioned psychiatric professionals as ‘engaged in truth regimes’ invites
understandable antagonism. Rhetoric contrasting these ‘sides’ can sidetrack
forward movement in either.
Discursive or ‘postmodern’ approaches to therapy are now common-
place, and ‘modern’ approaches are as vibrant as ever. Like many develop-

Tom Strong & Andy Lock 587
ments with premises different from those that preceded them, the discursive
therapies found some of their appeal in their ‘post’ identity. At the same time,
postmodern therapists trumpet their inclusivity, which assumedly would
extend to others practicing different approaches to therapy. Here, we would
like to focus on what we feel are some general features in the developing story
of discursive approaches to therapy. What discursive thinking can bring to
therapy, generally, is a greater awareness of how language features in what
we understand and what our communications produce.
A Discursive Perspective
…once we abandon ordering arguments or concerns as giving us our true identi-
ties or our only genuine access to the world, we can begin nurturing our various
cultural concerns and their various modes of inquiry.
—Spinosa, Flores & Dreyfus, 1997, p. 158
Naming, understanding and meaning-making are human undertak-
ings realized differently across social contexts. Common sense, from this
perspective, is not universal; it is recognized and practiced differently in such
local contexts (Garfinkel, 1967). Where modernity promised a universally
knowable world that could be understood in a correctly used language, other
discursive streams or contexts of meaning—approximating Wittgenstein’s
(1953) ‘forms of life’—have always flourished.
As ‘forms of life’ implies, this view of discourse sees people talking and
interacting in distinct ways that shape their meanings and accomplishments.
And even if we don’t accept a world that can be objectively talked about, our
‘common sense’ can still create for us a similarly homogenized view of ‘how
things are’: we can thus find ourselves living in our own blinkered monocul-
ture in the face of cultural diversity. Discursive thinking reminds us that we
have to be prepared to engage with other forms of common sense (Kögler,
1996), that charting a social course with ours alone is highly problematic.
It is for this reason that discursive approaches to therapy require going off
the ‘auto-pilot’ of our accustomed ways of talking and understanding, to
participate in meanings and ways of talk unfamiliar to us.
A discourse perspective sees our ways of talking and interacting and
our ways of thinking as integrated. Vygotsky (1978) suggested that our ways
of thinking arise through how we learn to interact with each other. And
it is conceptually difficult to see thought as unrelated to the social world
to which we must respond. Most therapists, for example, are trained to be

588 Janus Head
cognizant of the ideas that inform how they talk and practice with clients.
Philip Cushman (1995) extends his analyses beyond this: therapists and cli-
ents jointly participate in dominant socio-cultural discourses that shape their
views on problems, solutions, and practice. Psychotherapy in the Victorian
era therefore was based on different problems, solutions and therapeutic
practices than today. Not surprisingly, our thoughts, like our conversations,
can be seen as shaped or constrained by such dominant discourses.
Some discursive thinkers go further by suggesting that our thinking
relates to imagined or anticipated conversations and interactions; that we
learn to incorporate the responses of others into how we think about them
(Bakhtin, 1984). Bringing these two discursive streams of thought together,
our thinking can be regarded as shaped by cultural discourses, and the re-
sponses we make (or anticipate making) to more immediate communicative
interactions (Billig, 1996). ese shapers of our thinking/talking are more
pervasive than most of us normally consider. is perspective on thinking
is a far cry from the typical modern and western view that suggests that
individuals have minds detachable from the goings-on of their relational,
cultural and other circumstances.
Even more basic to discursive approaches to therapy is the idea that
communication does more than just report or describe (Watzlawick, Beavin
& Jackson, 1967). Users of discourses package understandings and how
they can be related, and they do this in value-based ways that preclude
other understandings or ways of relating them. How ‘respect’ is regarded
and practiced in different family, social or cultural contexts serves as a case
in point. Discourse, therefore, points to rule-like and value-based differ-
ences in how people systematically interact. Whether these differences are
examined according to who speaks when, the non-verbals that complement
or qualify messages, or in the words or subjects discussed—discourse can
be seen as participatory and performative (Edwards & Potter, 1992). Said
differently, discourse looks beyond any word, gesture or sentence, to systems
of meaningful practice that inform people’s interactions.
Complicating things further, people seldom participate in one dis-
course. e discourses of the workplace, while sharing some similarities,
are usually different from those at home or in the community. Yet each
can be seen as having requirements of its participants, requirements that
participants themselves have played some role in holding each other to or
shaping (Vološinov, 1973). To appreciate this, try managing family life or
close personal relationships according to the discourses of work or the mar-

Tom Strong & Andy Lock 589
ketplace. Discursive approaches to therapy are therefore concerned with this
participatory or performative aspect of communication (e.g., Newman &
Holzman, 1997). It is in drawing from and making use of these discourses
that we accomplish what we do with each other, and not all discourses serve
us optimally in pursuing these accomplishments. Indeed, some discursive
therapies invite clients to recognize and reflect on their accustomed discourses
and to try on others that might better serve them.
Discursive therapy?
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of language.
—Wittgenstein, 1953, aphorism 109
Discursive approaches to therapy often focus more on how any thera-
peutic conversation occurs than on what such conversation is about, even
though many discursive thinkers concede that conversation’s whats and hows
are highly correlated (e.g., Wittgenstein, 1953). Discursive therapists are
therefore concerned with engaging clients, critically and practically, in the
languages brought to and used in therapy. For them, this requires participa-
tive dialogue where clients’ preferences, understandings and resources are
central to determining how therapy will proceed. is sharing of therapeutic
decision-making can be seen as an ongoing negotiation. So for that matter
can all endeavours in arriving at therapy’s understandings. is fits what
John Shotter (1993) has referred to as “joint action.” Simply telling someone
that their experience is ‘X’ will not mean they understand or accept ‘X’ as
an account of their experience. Furthermore, given culturally-conferred and
other power differentials between client and therapist, extraordinary efforts
are often taken so as to be inclusive of the experiences and preferences of
clients (Parker, 1999).
For discursive therapists, the therapeutic conversation is where and how
change happens (deShazer, 1994). When clients’ presenting problems and
solutions can be seen as discursively related to how they are regarded and
talked about, therapy can be helpful insofar as it helps us put words to the
inarticulable. However, it also can be helpful should it: dis-solve a concern
(Anderson, 1997); generatively challenge our assumptions and introduce
new perspectives, prompt aha’s where we find our own solutions; or inspire
us to look beyond our normal cognitive horizons. us, discursive therapy
sees change occurring in the back and forth of communicative interaction.

590 Janus Head
A question, from this perspective, can serve as a potent intervention (Tomm,
1988). Other forms of therapy often see such talk as neutral ways of gathering
data to formulate problems and justify their theory-related interventions.
Discursive thinkers and practitioners are curious about what people
do with their talk, how they use it to influence each other (Austin, 1962).
To the extent that therapy helps clients make desired changes, discursive
therapists use particular conversational strategies, such as questions, to keep
therapy relevant and ‘on track’ from the client’s perspective. What clients
do with what therapists say, and what therapists then say in response to
what clients have said in response to them (and so on), are key features
of recognizing that the talk of therapy is consequential in ways that the
therapist can respond to, to keep things ‘on track’ (Walter & Peller, 1992).
In discursive therapy, the therapist is therefore attentive to his/her use of
language (and the client’s) for what that use accomplishes—with respect to
the client’s presenting concerns and with respect to the therapeutic relation-
ship. is attentiveness and responsiveness to what is accomplished—at its
most microscopic—plays out at each conversational turn and is at the heart
of what Donald Schön (1983) referred to as “reflective practice.”
Discursive therapists often promote curiosity about what our partici-
pation in any discourse obscures or has us take for granted (White, 1993).
What passes for real or good in our lives is seldom seen as a discursive matter.
Asking others how they came to understand what has seemed undeniably real
or good to them—in the particular way that they have—can seem revolution-
ary. is, among other ways that discursive therapists might intervene, raises
an ethical dimension seldom considered in other approaches to therapy. If
meanings aren’t out there to be named and acted upon correctly—if there
are other ways for experience to be named and related to—what are we then
to make of the meaning-altering influences of the discursive therapist?
Here, it helps to bear in mind notions from hermeneutics (e.g., Taylor,
1989) or critical discourse analysis (e.g., Wodak & Meyer, 2001) that, for a
meaning to achieve the status of real or good, other contenders for that status
were subordinated. ‘Authority’ regarding meaning has historically fallen to
religious, political and scientific figures who took turns as determiners of
‘the way things are or should be.’ In the postmodern era many meanings are
contested or seen to triumph. erapy itself is a place where the implications
of dominant or subordinated meanings can be explored, including those
put forward by therapists. Abandoned is the notion that therapists possess
better understandings of the circumstances and vicissitudes of clients’ lives

Tom Strong & Andy Lock 591
and thereby should proffer such ‘correct’ meanings or actions to clients. In
discursive approaches to therapy one aim is to collaboratively and critically
engage clients in processes that yield meanings they consider effective for
their lives (Andersen, 1991). Discursive therapists, therefore, are sensitive to
their use of talk in these processes, careful to not place clients in subordinate
roles that further alienate them from scrutinizing and making meanings
relevant to their lives, in or beyond therapy.
Discursive therapists view humans as users of language, most often
from discourses that dominate their ways of talking and relating. To that
end, humans are sometimes poets or authors (when seeking optimal ways
to express our experiences and desires), sometimes salespeople or politicians
(when trying to negotiate our coexistence with others), and sometimes car-
tographers or architects (when trying to map or construct language to suit
our purposes in physical reality). But it would be plain wrong to suggest that
we can use whatever words we want. While discourses package our ways of
talking and relating, those that dominate furnish certain possibilities while
constraining others (Martin & Sugarman, 1999). Consider this partially
as a resource issue. For example, to what extent does biomedical discourse
furnish words and ways of talking that can relieve suffering? It does if one
speaks of diagnosable symptoms for which medical intervention can make a
difference. But such a way of talking seldom turns poetic, where sufferer and
caregiver articulate quality of life understandings amenable to other, non-
medical forms of intervention. is need not digress into an either/or issue
about which discourse should dominate; both offer possibilities and limita-
tions. What matters is how people resourcefully interact within or across
discourses. While not determined by their participation in a discourse, the
words and ways of talking any discourse affords typically sets parameters for
how people can resourcefully improvise or work out their interactions. is
includes any discourse, understanding or practice developed within therapy
that departs from those commonly used in the contexts where clients may use
them. erapeutically, one challenge rests in how and from where words and
discourses can be resourcefully and improvisationally drawn, where certain
limiting meanings and ways of talk had previously dominated.
Summarizing thoughts
How might a discursive perspective on therapy be conceived in terms
of orienting ideas and practices? Here are a few summarizing thoughts on

592 Janus Head
what we have been saying:
1. All understandings and practices brought to, or developed in, therapy
are ‘locatable’ to particular discourses, including the therapist’s;
2. discursive awareness helps us recognize that any discourse affords
some resourceful possibilities, while constraining others;
3. talk itself is consequential for relationships and what is subsequently
talked about. My talk is shaped by others’ prior and anticipated talk,
and by our talking ‘within’ a dominant discourse;
4. misunderstandings, or failures to coordinate therapeutic intentions,
suggest that a discourse is needed or must be negotiated;
5. the discourses used to solve problems often need to be different from
those initially used to understand and present them;
6. all understandings and solutions developed in therapy are tested
in interactions beyond therapy. Sometimes this is where things get
stuck;
7. therapeutic culture is also discursively constructed in dominant ways.
A therapist’s dominant model or aggregate of therapeutic constructs
and practices was itself constructed in a discursive context in which
some resources are foregrounded more than others.
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