Client attitudinal stance and therapist-client affiliation: a view from grammar and social interaction

Although it is widely acknowledged in psychotherapy research that the de- velopment and maintenance of positive relational bonds are central to the therapeutic process, the ways that therapists and clients become affiliated through discourse and in- teraction has not received very much attention. Taking up this concern from a conversa- tion analytic perspective, this paper explores how therapists and clients negotiate affilia- tion around clients’ affective and evaluative talk or attitudinal stance. In order to illus- trate the application of our method, we have chosen to analyze audio- and video- recordings of two clinically relevant interactional contexts in which client stance con- structions frequently occur: (1) client narratives; (2) client disagreements with thera- pists. We show that therapist responses to client attitudinal stances play an important role not only in securing affiliation and positive relational bonds with clients, but also in moving the interaction in a therapeutically relevant direction