Abstract
An institutional discourse perspective is developed and applied to discursive therapies. The perspective focuses on the interactional and interpretive practices that organize therapist-client encounters. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and Foucauldian discourse analyses are discussed as different but related orientations to institutional discourse. Each perspective highlights different aspects of the institutional discourse perspective and discursive therapies. The perspective is applied by reconsidering the concept of collaboration in discursive therapies. Three issues are discussed. They are the value of thinking about collaboration as a shifting achievement in discursive therapy interactions, power relationships that include the potential for client resistance, and sites for the negotiation of multiple—sometimes competing—discourses.
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Miller, G. (2018). Discursive Therapies as Institutional Discourse. 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_5
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