Conference Agenda

The workshop will introduce the participants to conversation analytical method of analyzing therapeutic interaction, with particular focus on work with grieving families. The workshop starts with a short lecture on conversation analysis (CA) as a method of investigating human interactions in informal and professional settings. In particular, the lecture will focus on conversation analytical research of psychotherapeutic interaction. The lecture will show how sequential relations between utterances enable a process of transformation of experience. The workshop shows how the utterance-by-utterance transformation contributes to process of change in a more macroscopic time, spanning over the continuum of psychotherapeutic sessions.

After the short lecture, the workshop will engage in the analysis of video recorded couple therapy sessions. The therapy processes that we will analyze have to do with complicated grief including ambiguous loss and prolonged grief disorder. Taking up the concepts introduced in the lecture, the joint data analysis focusses on the ways in which the participants’ choices of words (pronouns, nouns, or proper names) whereby they refer to the deceased child change over the course of the therapy. Likewise, we will examine how the descriptions of clients' emotional experience as well as ways of allocating responsibility get transformed. We will examine these transformations both in the sequential time (spanning across the adjacent utterances of the spouses and the therapist in single sessions) and in the therapy-processual time (spanning across the therapy sessions).

The workshop is meant for researchers and clinicians interested in grieving processes and/or conversation analytical method. After the workshop, the participants have basic understanding of the focus of data-analysis is CA, and of the methods of grieving therapy.