Discordances in Ascriptions of Agency and Reflectivity in the First Psychotherapy Session

Abstract

We analyzed the first sessions of nine long-term individual psychotherapies with a model of ten discursive tools of agency ascription and studied discursive discordances, sequences of two talk turns in which the therapeutic dyad was misaligned in terms of how they ascribed agency to the client. We also studied how the clients’ agency self-ascriptions in the turn immediately following the discordances changed from the first turn. Classifying these discordance sequences, eight different types of sequences were found. One, in which the clients’ reflective agency constructions were missed by the therapists, was subjected to a detailed analysis.