CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Anssi Peräkylä (Sociology, University of Helsinki): "Interpretation after Interpretation: Third Position Utterances in Psychoanalytic Interaction" February 4, 2009, 5pm. Place: Haines Hall 352.

This presentation will focus on psychoanalysts' third position utterances that come after the patients' responses to the analysts' interpretations. The data consist of 58 audio recorded psychoanalytic sessions involving three analyst-patient dyads. The interactions take place in Finnish. The analysts belong to the International Psychoanalytic Association, and their theoretical orientation is informed by classical Freudian as well as object relations and self-psychological ideas.

The default response to an interpretation involves elaboration by the patient. In such response the patient not only agrees with the interpretation, but takes it up and continues it or applies it in his or her own talk (Peräkylä 2005; Bercelli et al 2008). After such patient elaborations, the anaylsts in their third position utterances ordinarily continue the interpretative activity by utterances that extend or formulate the patients' responses. The third position utterances regularly involve both aligning and misaligning elements relative to the patients' preceding turns (patients' elaborations of the initial interpretations). 

Through their third position utterances, the analysts on one hand ratify the patients' understandings shown in their elaborations. On the other, however they redirect these understandings through a shift of perspective in description. The shift of perspective can be exposed (involving disjunction markers at the utterance beginning) but more often it is embedded or implicit. 

Through the shift of perspective, the analyst redirects the patients' attention in therapeutically relevant ways. The shift can involve intensification of the affect conveyed by the elaboration, bringing forward a new layer of affect, bringing forward new contexts or 'objects', or redirecting the focus from outer world back to the patient's self.

The observations reported in this presentation indicate that the psychoanalytic work does not end at the interpretation or at the patient's response to it, but continues in and through the ways in which the analyst deals with the patient's interpretation. this continuity of interpretative activity is discussed in terms of Haydee Feimberg's psychoanalytic concept of 'listening to listening'.

References

Bercelli, F., F. Rossano, and M. Viaro. (2008). Clients' responses to therapists' reinterpretations. In A. Peräkylä, C. Antaki, S. Vehviläinen and I. Leudar (Eds.). Conversation Analysis and Psychotherapy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 43-61.

Faimberg, H. (1996). Listening to Listening. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 11:667-677.

Peräkylä, A. (2005). Patients' responses to interpretations: A dialogue between conversation analysis and psychoanalytic theory. Communication and Medicine 2(2):163-176.