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LAING'S
DEMONSTRATION
 In
1985, at the first Evolution of Psychotherapy
Conference, organized by the Erickson Foundation
and held in Phoenix, Arizona, Dr. Ronald Laing gave
a demonstration of his approach to therapy. He met
and talked with a woman, Leila, who had been
diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, while cameras
recorded the conversation and relayed it to the
audience. The New York Times described the
occasion:
"R.
D. Laing, the British psychiatrist whose methods
owe much to such existential philosophers as
Sartre, interviewed a para- i noid woman from a
Phoenix shelter for the homeless. The interview
seemed to be no more than mere conversation. It
began with the woman stiffly telling Dr. Laing
of a grand conspiracy against her while their
conversation was broadcast by closed-circuit
television to a nearby audience of more than
1,000 therapists.
By
the end of the interview, Dr. Laing and the
woman had achieved such a rapport that she
seemed much less troubled and spontaneously
offered to join him on the podium in the .co
nearby lecture hall, where she answered
questions with lucidity from the assembled
therapists.
The
elusive nature of the therapeutic exchange was
highlighted by the fact that some people in the
audience maintained that nothing much had
happened in the interview, while Dr. Minuchin,
the family therapist, rose from the audience to
praise the interview as an example of the
highest clinical art. Still others objected to
Dr. Laing's explanation that it is as important
just to be with someone in deep rapport as it is
to try to change them. That event seemed
emblematic of the vast differences in
perspective that plague the field" (cited in A.
C. Laing, 1994, p. 224).
For
the past five years I have asked students in my
masters research methods course to analyze the
video recording of Laing's demonstration at this
conference. The video recording offers a rare
opportunity to see the famous existential
psychotherapist in action. It also provides an
opportunity to study in detail the process, the
praxis, of psychotherapy, and to demonstrate the
power and utility of interpretive analysis. The
course introduces students to the logic of inquiry
of interpretive research, and the papers in this
issue of Methods are developed from
exemplary student work. The four students
collaborated with me on a presentation at the
American Psychological Association annual meeting
in 2000 in Washington, D. C. (Bortle, Goldman,
Harper, Hwang & Packer, 2000). Each of their
papers approaches the interaction from a somewhat
different perspective, and together they provide an
account of Laing's work that shows us the
ontological features of this kind, at least, of
psychotherapy.
During
the discussion that took place after the
demonstration a member of the audience asked Laing,
"I was wondering what you thought went on
therapeutically in that interview?" : Laing
replied, "What do you think went on
therapeutically?" "I'm mystified, to tell you the
truth," the questioner responded, "So maybe you can
explain It to me." "If you're mystified," Laing
said, "I can't explain it to you."
This
exchange might seem to confirm the worst suspicions
about existential psychotherapy, that it is
unscientific, opaque, and elusive. And yet we
believe that the process of this kind of therapy,
like any other, can be described, and its outcomes
explored. However, as Laing himself suggests,
observers and even researchers will remain
mystified about the process of psychotherapy until
they attend to phenomena of talk that are central
and crucial but typically go unnoticed. One of the
aims of the papers in this issue is to articulate
several of these phenomena.
TECHNIQUES
OF OBJECTIFICATION
Paul
Ricoeur has proposed (1976) that interpretation
requires a phase of objectification and "productive
distance" (p. 89) --that there is a necessary
dialectic of understanding and explanation where
"in explanation we ex-plicate or unfold the range
of propositions and meanings, whereas in
understanding we comprehend or grasp as a whole the
chain of partial meanings in one act of synthesis
(p. 72). Productive distance "means methodological
distanciation" (p. 89): "understanding... is more
directed towards the intentional unity of
discourse, [while] explanation...is more
directed towards the analytic structure of the
text" (p. 74; see Thompson, 1990, p. 278). This
phase is "one stage --albeit a necessary one--
between a naive interpretation and a critical one,
between a surface interpretation and a depth
interpretation" (p. 87). It provides an
intermediary that takes us from I "understanding"
to "comprehension"; from "a naive grasping of the
meaning of the text as a whole" to "a sophisticated
mode of understanding, supported by explanatory
procedures" (p. 74).
The
explanatory framework that Ricoeur himself employed
was structuralism, but to my taste this entails far
too radical an objectification (see Thompson, 1981
p.161). The choice of technique (if that is the
appropriate word) should surely reflect the kind of
material being studied. First-person accounts would
call for some kind of narrative analysis; films for
a technique attentive to mise en scene and montage.
Conversation requires an objectifying technique
that will attend to its pragmatic features within
the general logic of interpretive inquiry. Next I
give a brief overview of the specific technique
that we have drawn upon in our analysis of Laing's
demonstration, conversation analysis. After that I
will describe the ways in which we go beyond
conversation analysis to explore the ontological
work accomplished in conversation
CONVERSATION
ANALYSIS
Conversation
analysis has become considered one of the major
approaches to the pragmatic analysis of
conversation i:. (Levinson, 1983, p. 286ff;
Nofsinger, 1991; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson,
1974). Often known simply and affectionately as
"CA," it employs a game metaphor of "turns" and
"moves" and so remains consonant with
Wittgenstein's notion of language game. CA is an
analysis of talk in terms just like those
emphasized by Lyotard: "not as a syntactic code, or
as a medium that reports events in some external
world, but rather as a mode of action embedded
within human interaction" (Goodwin & Duranti,
1992, p. 29). It is assumed that:
"Conversation
is a process in which people interact on a moi:
ment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. During a
sequence of J) turns participants exchange talk
with each other, but, more I J important, they
exchange social or communicative actions. ,
These actions are the 'moves' of conversation
considered as a , collection of games. Indeed,
conversational actions are some of the most
important moves of the broader 'game of every-
I' day life'" (Nofsinger, 1991, p. 10).
In
order to grasp the character and goals of CA it is
helpful to consider one of its roots,
ethnomethodology (see Garfinkel, 1967; Turner,
1974):
"[Ethnomethodology]
arose in reaction to the quantitative techniques,
and the arbitrary imposition on the data of
supposedly objective categories (upon which such
techniques generally rely), that were typical of
mainstream American sociology. In contrast, it was
argued cogently, the proper object of sociological
study is the set of techniques that the members of
a society themselves utilize to interpret and act
within their own social worlds - the sociologist's
'objective' methods perhaps not really being
different in kind at all. Hence the use of the term
ethnomethodology, the study of 'ethnic' (i.e.
participants' own) methods of production and
interpretation of social interaction" (Levinson,
1983, p. 295).
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