What actually happens in counselling interactions?

How does counselling bring about change?

How do clients end up producing new and alternative stories of their lives and relationships?

By addressing these questions and others, Peter Muntigl explores the narrative counselling process in the context where it is enacted: the unfolding conversation between counsellor and clients. Through a transdisciplinary approach that combines conversation analysis and systemic functional linguistic theory, Muntigl demonstrates how language is used in couples counselling, how language use changes over the course of counselling, and how this process provides clients with new linguistic resources that help them change their social relationships.

This book will be a valuable resource not only for linguists and discourse analysts, but also for researchers and practitioners in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, psychology, and medicine.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements ix 1. Modeling semiotic change in narrative couselling 1–20 2. Conversation Analysis 21–46 3. Systemic functional linguistics 47–105 4. Logogenesis 107–132 5. Reformulations as local transformations 133–178 6. Problem construction 179–232 7. Problem effacement 233–267 8. Clients' semiotic repertoires 269–306 9. Phylogenesis and concluding remarks 307–332 Notes 333 References 335–342 Index 343–346