Honouring our great grandparents: towards a rhetorical analysis of family therapy

Abstract

This paper argues that family therapy is an inherently and inescapably rhetorical activity, although its connections with rhetoric have remained largely ignored and the implications for practice unexplored. An uncritical acceptance of a range of postmodern ideas has led many family therapists to ignore the power of their therapeutic rhetoric. The paper offers rhetorical analysis as a tool to help family therapists to reflect on the rhetorical power of their practice and thereby to exercise this power more responsibly.

Jointly created authority: a conversation analysis of how power is managed by parents and systemic psychotherapists in children’s social care

“…Systemic practitioners' use of videotape and 'live', rather than retrospective, supervision fits with CA's preference for using naturally occurring data to understand what people are creating between them, and there is an argument that CA can increase the possibility for reflexive practice that is so important to systemic psychotherapists. In the systemic field, authors such as Roy-Chowdhury (2006) Guilfoyle (2003) and Klaushofer (2007) used discourse analysis to show the potential of these methods in the field of systemic psychotherapy, where the impact of the process as well as the content of talk is so relevant. Since then, this area of interest has been growing and being refined in a significant body of CA work (Muntigl and Horvath, 2016;O'Reilly, 2007O'Reilly, , 2008aO'Reilly, , b, 2014O'Reilly, , 2015O'Reilly and Lester, 2016).…”