Third parties' voices in a therapeutic interview

Abstract

Drawing on a dialogical approach inspired by Bakhtin, we start from the assumption that a concrete discussion is an intermingling between dialogue in praesentia and dialogue in absentia, and we refer to the notion of “enunciative positioning” to account for the various relations that a speaker may express toward the voices that he or she invokes. Our data are based on a first therapeutic interview between a therapist, a mother, and a child in a counseling center for children and adolescents. We identify the various voices invoked in this interview and show that three levels of discursive process were involved: (a) the speakers invoked absent speakers; (b) at the same time they developed their own discourse on the basis of their interlocutors' discourse which (c) itself drew on absent speakers or voices. We highlight the various discursive processes through which the speakers integrate their own voice into absent voices, or integrate a distant voice so that it loses its property of being a distant (and borrowed) voice. As a theoretical and methodological contribution to dialogism, our results show that absent voices and their specific intermingling with hic et nunc exchanges were a major resource for therapeutic processes.