AUTHOR=Peräkylä Anssi , Taurogiński Bartłomiej , Dejko-Wańczyk Karolina , Józefik Barbara , Furgał Mariusz , Matusiak Feliks , Janusz Bernadetta 

TITLE=The paradox of disengagement: Bodily displays of inattention in couple therapy

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1066475

DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2023.1066475

ISSN=2297-900X

ABSTRACT=Using concepts coming from Goffman and theory of intercorporeality, the paper describes the non-speaking spouses’ responses to the complaints made about them by the other spouse, in the context of couple therapy first consultations. While the turn-taking system of couple therapy effectively precludes the possibility of a direct verbal response, the non-speaking spouses often display bodily their disengagement from their spouse’s talk. Using multimodal conversation analysis as method, we show the repertoire of such disengagement behaviors and trace the moment-by-moment contexts where they arise. While the disengagement behaviors embody their producer's inattention to the spouses talk, they in the same time, paradoxically, are interactional moves produced in the presence of others, conveying their producer's negative relation to the ongoing talk. We argue that the the timing of the practices of disengagement involves anticipation of the direction of talk: the non-speaking spouses display disengagement in moments when the speaking spouse’s talk takes a direction towards an intensification of complaint about them.