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This article presents a revised version of GAT, a transcription system first developed by a group of German conversation analysts and interactional linguists in 1998. GAT tries to follow as many principles and conventions as possible of the Jefferson-style transcription used in Conversation Analysis, yet proposes some conventions which are more compatible with linguistic and phonetic analyses of spoken language, especially for the representation of prosody in talk-in-interaction. After ten years of use by researchers in conversation and discourse analysis, the original GAT has been revised, against the background of past experience and in light of new necessities for the transcription of corpora arising from technological advances and methodological developments over recent years. The present text makes GAT accessible for the English-speaking community. It presents the GAT 2 transcription system with all its conventions and gives detailed instructions on how to transcribe spoken interaction at three levels of delicacy: minimal, basic and fine. In addition, it briefly introduces some tools that may be helpful for the user: the German online tutorial GAT-TO and the transcription editing software FOLKER.

Self-disclosure is endemic to psychotherapy. Though clients themselves disclose their experiences and emotional states during the course of a psychotherapy session, they typically do so with extensive prodding on the part of their therapists. Thus, the therapist's interactional role is an agentive one, facilitating a client's verbalization of therapeutically-relevant material. In this article we will discuss how the therapist manages such facilitation locally when the client (unexpectedly) ceases his/her self-disclosure, often at potentially therapeutically relevant moments. As a locally-managed interactional practice, the therapist's intervention resumes the client's self-disclosure. Since such intervention emerges amidst ongoing, emotionally-loaded revelations on the part of the client, they should be interactionally aligned with the client's contribution. This paper describes how the psychotherapist enables the client to verbalize significant aspects of self aspects that may never before have been verbalized or, if verbalized, failed to elicit any empathetic response from an interested listener. This paper presents how specific communicative strategies and language forms take on therapeutic value in the discussed context, underlining that the communicative function is not pre-ordained but rather remains to be actively constructed in discourse. Data taken from a corpus of audio recordings of actual therapy sessions conducted in August and October, 2004, document the practical application of a Relational Psychotherapy approach based on such categories of methods as, among others, inquiry, attunement, and involvement (Erskine et al. 1999).

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Self-reflexivity and self-identity have turned into core projects of modern times. As a result, women and men of different cultural backgrounds increasingly often seek support in therapy and counseling. However, talking through things, being open in relationships and seeking happiness as psychotherapeutic values and modes of talk also infiltrate everyday activities and professional tasks (Fairclough 1992; Cameron 2000a; McLeod & Wright 2003). Indeed members of late modern societies live in what is commonly referred to as ‘therapeutic culture’ (cf. Giddens 1991; Furedi 2004). In this paper we make a link between self-identity in modernity, the discourse of psychotherapy and coaching and symbolic feminine discourse to claim that the psychotherapeutic strategies and modes of constituting the self are in fact gendered, i.e. they rely on aspects of symbolic feminine discourse (cf. Lakoff 1975; Coates 1996; Holmes 1998). And since a successful modern communicator, both in private and professional settings, needs to rely on discourse norms as well as interactional and communicative strategies which are at the heart of various forms of ‘talking cure’, feminine discourse can function as an agent of emancipation and social/professional advancement. This is a particularly socially-charged issue since public sphere in most societies still predominately belongs to men.