The Building of Empathy: Conceptual “Pillars” and Conversational Practices in Psychotherapy

Abstract

Empathy can be considered a special type of cooperation between therapist and patient. This exploratory study compares psychoanalytical, depth-psychological and behavioural therapy, in each case using transcriptions of audio recordings of initial, mid-term and late sessions. For each school of therapy, five treatments are included, creating a database of 45 sessions. We describe the project and the method of conversation analysis using examples of these transcripts and hypothesise that while all three schools of therapy are faced with common fundamental problems concerning the realisation of empathy, one can observe empathy profiles specific to each school. Here, we introduce theoretical groundwork and the terminology of conversation analysis. The topic may be of particular interest to clinicians, since everyday problems are examined through the prism of microanalysis.

A Dual Route Model for Regulating Emotions: Comparing Models, Techniques and Biological Mechanisms

“…During sessions, the therapist shows that he/her understands why the patient shows dysfunctional patterns, and explains how they are relative to traumatic childhood experiences Beyond empathic confrontation, an empathic attitude of the therapist can be considered the basis for all therapeutic interventions. Communication research has largely contributed to the description of empathic interventions emphasizing the role of non-verbal aspects such as prosody or physiological synchronization (Wynn and Wynn, 2006;Cameron, 2011;Messina et al, 2013;Buchholz, 2014;Weiste and Peräkylä, 2014;Peräkylä et al, 2015;Buchholz et al, 2017;Voutilainen et al, 2018).…”

Schema Therapy: The Healthy Adult Meets Sherlock Holmes—An Enactivist and Embodied Cognition Perspective of Metaphor

“…"), as a way to compensate for the potentially perceived lecturing nature of "psychoeducation speech" at hand. This is consistent with using conceptual pillars and conversational practices in the building of empathy in psychotherapy (Buchholz et al, 2017). Similarly, therapist self-disclosure "can be an effective tool for strengthening the therapeutic bond and facilitating client change" and "can be a powerful intervention" (Goldfried et al, 2003: p. 555).…”

From turn-by-turn to larger chunks of talk: An exploratory study in psychotherapeutic micro-processes using conversation analysis

“…The answer was no, there is too much difference in concepts and in relational practice. Nevertheless, we could contribute to a CA-approach to empathy (Buchholz et al, 2017 ; Buchholz 2016 ). In qualitative research it is not seldom that the data gain dominance over hypotheses; the material leads to interesting questions one had not expected in advance.…”