The Linguistics of Psychotherapy

To “heal sick people via words” Antiphon of Athens already claimed in the 5th century before Christ. In the 19th century Freud and Breuer stated that signs of hysteria disappeared via talking with the female patients about their triggering memories. Thus, talking was functionalized as the central tool to treat psychic problems and connected somatic symptoms. Clearly, the importance of language is the reason why linguistic and sociological conversation analysis addresses psychotherapy and psychosomatics as relevant fields of research.

The lecture sketches the short history of research about therapy in linguistics and conversation analysis and gives an overview about the main topics in these fields as e.g. types of actions and their interactional sequencing. A special focus will be on the action format requesting examples which could be seen as a paradigm for change communication in the psychotherapeutic process.

The lecture will be held in English

Professor Spranz-Fogasy is a Professor of German Linguistics at the Institute of the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Mannheim. His research is located within conversation analysis and applied linguistics, and his current area of specialization is medical communication as well as research on argumentation and the constitution of meaning. Until Nov. 4, he is a guest professor in our department.

Lecture poster