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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1397523

LANGUAGE CHECK WILL BE DONE AFTER REVISION! Silence after narratives by patients in psychodynamic psychotherapy: A conversation analytic study

Provisionally accepted
Carolina Fenner Carolina Fenner *
  • Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In psychotherapy, talking is the key activity. Consequently, if the patient remains silent, this may be done in service of different functions, such as thinking about something more deeply, being unwilling to elaborate, etc. This article examines one special environment in which silence occurs conversation analytically: When a patient has closed his/her story, both participants resist the turn allocation by their partner and remain silent instead. The results indicate that both the therapist and the patient produce silence jointly. Therapists end the silence with an intervention, focusing on an aspect of the topic and thereby treating the silence as an intra-topic silence. The study is based on about 29 hours of video recordings of German-speaking outpatient psychodynamic psychotherapies. This paper contributes to increasing therapists' awareness of the various forms of silence that can occur in psychotherapy.

    Keywords: Silence, turn-taking, psychodynamic psychotherapy, conversation analysis, Narrative, Therapeutic intervention, Resistance

    Received: 16 May 2024; Accepted: 25 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Fenner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Carolina Fenner, Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim, Germany

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