Abstract
This commentary suggests that discursive methods offer valuable tools for psychotherapy research and that discursive research on psychotherapy is ripe for synthesis. It suggests that the source and persistence of discourses can be understood as reflecting the historicity of signs: the distinctive language of a particular discourse accumulates and reproduces the experiences of people who have previously engaged in those discourses. This historical conservatism helps explain some undesirable features of discourses, such as objectionably inequitable power distributions and mismatches between some people’s lived experience and the subject positions to which prevalent discourses assign them.
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Stiles, W.B. (2018). Discursive Research from an Assimilation Model Perspective. In: Smoliak, O., Strong, T. (eds) Therapy as Discourse. The Language of Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93067-1_10
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