Ambivalence of Collaboration in Psychotherapy Room: Perspectives of Sadomasochism and Conversation Analysis

Format Type

Plenary

Format Type

Paper

Start Date

13-1-2021 4:50 PM

End Date

13-1-2021 5:10 PM

Abstract

Psychotherapy process and outcome researchers have long been trying to extricate what makes a psychotherapy successful. Almost six decades of research signify that psychotherapy relationship is of the essence. The quality of psychotherapy relationship depends on many circumstances of a therapist-client dyad, one of which is personality organization. Sadomasochism is a personality organization that individuals’ relationship with pain is intricate so vicious circles of abusive and/or painful interactions with others are pervasive. Although this complicates the psychotherapy process, research on sadomasochistic dynamics in psychotherapy is scarce. Thus, the current study is aimed to probe how clients displaying sadomasochistic personality and therapists interact. For doing so, four viable therapist-client dyads were recruited who had terminated a psychotherapy process. Audio recorded sessions of the participants were transcribed and analyzed using conversation analysis (CA) as it enables researchers to examine the micro intersubjective dynamics of daily and institutional interactions. The analysis revealed that the process was characterized by moments of collaboration, break of collaboration and ambivalence of collaboration. Interactions of collaboration and break of collaboration reflected almost identical conversational strategies documented by previous research. However, ambiguity of collaboration as an uncommon pattern of interaction in general was encountered extensively in this study. Conversations of the dyads in that moments were collaborative in terms of content but uncollaborative in terms of how the talk is organized, and vice versa. The extracts representing these moments will be presented and implications for sadomasochistic relatedness in psychotherapy and promises of CA for psychotherapy research will be discussed.

Keywords

psychotherapy process research, conversation analysis, sadomasochism, psychotherapy relationship

ORCID ID

0000-0002-9231-8141

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Jan 13th, 4:50 PM Jan 13th, 5:10 PM

Ambivalence of Collaboration in Psychotherapy Room: Perspectives of Sadomasochism and Conversation Analysis

Psychotherapy process and outcome researchers have long been trying to extricate what makes a psychotherapy successful. Almost six decades of research signify that psychotherapy relationship is of the essence. The quality of psychotherapy relationship depends on many circumstances of a therapist-client dyad, one of which is personality organization. Sadomasochism is a personality organization that individuals’ relationship with pain is intricate so vicious circles of abusive and/or painful interactions with others are pervasive. Although this complicates the psychotherapy process, research on sadomasochistic dynamics in psychotherapy is scarce. Thus, the current study is aimed to probe how clients displaying sadomasochistic personality and therapists interact. For doing so, four viable therapist-client dyads were recruited who had terminated a psychotherapy process. Audio recorded sessions of the participants were transcribed and analyzed using conversation analysis (CA) as it enables researchers to examine the micro intersubjective dynamics of daily and institutional interactions. The analysis revealed that the process was characterized by moments of collaboration, break of collaboration and ambivalence of collaboration. Interactions of collaboration and break of collaboration reflected almost identical conversational strategies documented by previous research. However, ambiguity of collaboration as an uncommon pattern of interaction in general was encountered extensively in this study. Conversations of the dyads in that moments were collaborative in terms of content but uncollaborative in terms of how the talk is organized, and vice versa. The extracts representing these moments will be presented and implications for sadomasochistic relatedness in psychotherapy and promises of CA for psychotherapy research will be discussed.