Janusz Bernadetta, Pawelczyk Joanna, Józefik Barbara
Laboratory of Psychology and Systemic Psychotherapy, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jagiellonian University Medical College, Krakow, Poland.
Department of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Studies, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland.
J Marital Fam Ther. 2023 Oct;49(4):842-860. doi: 10.1111/jmft.12661. Epub 2023 Jul 31.
This article examines how family and couple therapists respond to uneven alliances with their clients at the micro-level of therapeutic exchanges in the context of Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) interviews. We operationalize uneven alliance with the interactional concept of asymmetry of affiliation. To this end, first, using conversation analysis (CA), we identify episodes of asymmetry of affiliation in the moment-by-moment conversation between the therapist and the client in therapy consultation. Second, applying CA to the IPR interview data, we examine how therapists orient to the episodes of the session in which the asymmetry of affiliation was identified. The findings demonstrate therapists' two key practices of orienting to the episodes of asymmetry of affiliation: (1) therapists' exclusive identification with one participant by typically invoking gender roles and (2) therapists' investigation of their agency in the emergence of asymmetry.
