Constructions of Nonagency in the Clients’ Initial Problem Formulations at the Outset of Psychotherapy

This multiple case study investigated how clients construct nonagentic positions when formulating their problems in the beginning of their first psychotherapy session. The initial problem formulations of nine clients entering psychotherapy were analyzed with a detailed model drawing on discursive methodology, the 10 Discursive Tools model (10DT). We found ten problem formulation categories, each one distinguished by the tool from the 10DT model primarily used to construct nonagency. All clients gave several problem formulations from different categories and constructed nonagentic positions with a variety of discursive tools. When the resulting problem formulation categories were read in com…

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Constructing Nonagency at the Beginning of Psychotherapy : The 10DT model

This study examined how nine clients discursively constructed non-agency in their first session of individual psychotherapy. With open reading and linguistic analysis of the transcribed first sessions, combined with theory-based considerations, we created a model of discursive means for ascribing agentic and non-agentic positions, the 10 Discursive Tools model (10DT). There was large variability in how the tools functioned to create the impression of problematic agency, and the clients could not be classified according to their tool use patterns. The study shows the potential of the 10DT model for the detailed examination of presentations of “not-being-able” produced by psychotherapy client…

Discordances in Ascriptions of Agency and Reflectivity in the First Psychotherapy Session

We analyzed the first sessions of nine long-term individual psychotherapies with a model of ten discursive tools of agency ascription and studied discursive discordances, sequences of two talk turns in which the therapeutic dyad was misaligned in terms of how they ascribed agency to the client. We also studied how the clients’ agency self-ascriptions in the turn immediately following the discordances changed from the first turn. Classifying these discordance sequences, eight different types of sequences were found. One, in which the clients’ reflective agency constructions were missed by the therapists, was subjected to a detailed analysis. peerReviewed