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In this paper we examine how couple and family therapists, in accounting for the moments of their first therapeutic encounters identified as meaningful, invoke asymmetric affiliations with their clients in the Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) dialogues. Applying Conversation Analysis and drawing on Membership Categorization Analysis, we analyze how these invoked (dis)affiliations are constructed in the fine interactional details of the interview and in/through the categories mobilized by the participants. The findings show therapists’ explicit affiliation with one spouse and often concurrently disaffiliation with the other in yet another interactive format. Consequently, the asymmetric affiliations are further strengthened by remaining unrecognized, unaddressed and ultimately unreflected in the IPR dialogue. The interviewer’s key role in promoting or constraining the therapist’s recognition of the asymmetric relations is discussed.

A quasi-idiomatic expression ‘women have to prove themselves’ reflects various performance pressures and heightened visibility of women functioning in gendered professional spaces as advocated by tokenism theory. It is an example of how discriminatory practice – according to which competent and qualified women entering the culturally masculine professions are explicitly and implicitly expected to work harder for any recognition – gets discoursed in language and becomes a “rhetorically powerful form of talk” (Kitzinger 2000: 124). This paper explores the question: what is it that U.S. servicewomen functioning in the culturally hypermasculine space need to do to prove themselves? To this end, qualitative semi-structured interviews with women veterans of the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are qualitatively scrutinized with the methods of discourse analysis and conversation analysis to 1) identify practices that U.S. servicewomen engage in to symbolically (re-)claim their place and status in the military, i.e., to prove they belong; 2) find out how the talk around proving emerged in the course of the conversation and how it was further interactionally sustained and/or dealt with in talk-in-interaction. The findings of the micro-level analysis – interpreted through the lenses of tokenism and the category of the ‘honorary man’ – reveal women’s complex and nuanced struggle to fit and find acceptance in the military culture of hypermasculinity. They also re-engage with the ideas of tokenism by demonstrating that various acts of proving, reflecting women’s token status, may concurrently and paradoxically be a means to earn honorary man status.

Sociocultural factors are recognized as among the causes of eating disorders (EDs) in general and bulimia in particular. The social constructions of gender constitute a key factor among these causes and bulimia can then be construed as a response to a failure to meet the social (dominant and normative) expectations of what it means to be a woman, as females remain the majority of people suffering from EDs. This article – informed by a critical feminist perspective – uses the micro-analytic frameworks of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis to qualitatively examine relevant extracts of three psychotherapy sessions with women suffering from bulimia. The audio-recorded sessions represent systemic and social constructionist therapies and were originally conducted in Polish and Italian. The analysis focuses on how gender and gendered propositions are invoked by the therapist and/or the patient and further worked with in the subsequent turns. The contents of gendered propositions will be identified as well as whether, and if so how, they are interactionally deconstructed in the local context of the interaction. The analysis demonstrates how the female patients rely on categorization work around gender in addressing their own issues. The findings call for therapists’ greater awareness and reflexivity as to their interactional handling of gender in view of patients’ individual experiences.

Therapeutic alliance is often posed as an explanation for why therapy works, and there seems to be a consistent finding that the stronger the alliance, the greater the therapeutic change. Although extensively documented in the professional literature as an essential aspect of therapeutic alliance, the concept of emotional presence and its actualization in moment-by-moment interaction have not been adequately described. This paper applies integrative qualitative methodology, including tools and insights from discourse analysis and conversation analysis, to five extracts of Relationship-focused Integrative Psychotherapy sessions with three different clients. It examines the concept of emotional presence operationalized in terms of the therapist’s invoking the client’s immediate experience. The analytical focus falls on an interactive sequence involving the therapist’s topicalization of the client’s (proffered) non-verbal cues aiming at eliciting emotion talk in the interactional here-and-now and the latter’s orientation to it. The psychotherapist’s strategy of emotional presence is proposed to play a salient role in promoting the client’s (gradual) change by focusing the talk on the client’s here-and-now experience. Thus clients are prompted to project their emotions and/or engage in overt self-reflexive examination of emotional and relational patterns in the immediate context of their concrete trouble-telling. By being regularly exposed to such practices in therapy, clients are instilled with a sense of being in touch with how they feel about a particular situation or person.

Guest Editorial

Women currently serve in 95 percent of all US Army occupations and make up 16.3 percent of the active Army forces. Numerous measures have been taken in the form of regulations and policies to advance the presence and position of women in the military (e.g., the recent lifting of the ban on women serving in combat roles). It is claimed, however, that the broader ideology of masculinity prevalent in the institution is much more effective in constraining women’s participation than either specific institutional or interpersonal limitations. This paper, drawing on membership categorization analysis and conversation analysis, exposes some of the gendered propositions and gender ideologies produced by war veterans in the context of interviews. To this end, selected interviews with American female and male war veterans taken from the Veterans History Project (run by the Library of Congress) are qualitatively scrutinized. The analysis demonstrates how gender is occasioned and accounted for when describing military experiences and dayto-day operation of the army. It furthermore reveals the categorization work performed by the veterans that allows us to access various commonsense assumptions concerning the positions of women and men in the contemporary US Army. All in all, the paper points to the continuous relevance of gender in the military.

One of the goals of psychotherapy with bulimia patients is identification of the functions of the eating disorder in their lives. Thus, as in any psychotherapeutic approach, the therapist should facilitate the patient’s disclosure of his or her experience of living with bulimia. Talking about one’s dysphoric experiences and, particularly in the case of bulimia, symptoms and experiences that commonly deprive people with bulimia of dignity, constitutes an emotional challenge for the patient and an equally challenging interactional task for the therapist. Using the example of one therapy session with a female bulimia patient, we examine how the therapist and the patient interactionally engage in co-constructing the patient’s expertise – involving epistemics of experience as well as epistemics of expertise – concerning the illness in the interactional here-and-now. Applying tools and insights from discourse and conversation analysis, we examine the sequences in which the patient shifts the topical focus from a general observation concerning bulimia to her personal experience, to be further pursued interactionally by the therapist. We also discuss how the therapist downgrades her epistemic position and (concurrently) foregrounds and bolsters the patient’s voice as expert to accomplish the session’s therapeutic goals.

Caring for a terminally ill family member poses a great emotional challenge for an individual who, on the one hand, realizes the approaching death of a loved one and on the other, may experience various conflicting and negative emotions related to the task of caring itself. The gradual loss of a relationship with a close relative entails “a break in the integrated self” (Neuman Y, Nadav M, Bessor Y, J Pragmat 38:1369–1384, 2006). The context of psychotherapy offers a safe place where people can give voice to their painful and confusing emotions as well as work through their ongoing experience of loss (Pawelczyk J, Poznan Studies Contrastive Linguist 48(1):1–21, 2012).

Psychotherapy constitutes one of the contexts in which narrating one's personal experience is highly encouraged and expected. By telling their life stories, clients are able to organize their "autobiographical self" as well as voice the aspects of their experience that need therapeutic intervention in order for the client to live a more fulfilling life. Informed by insights and methods of conversation analysis and discourse analysis, this paper discusses narrative as a practice situated within social interaction. The study examines how clients' personal narratives in psychotherapy sessions emerge as co-constructed interactional accomplishments, focusing on the active role of the psychotherapist in facilitating clients' troubles-telling. The functions of the therapist's interventions will be scrutinized in terms of their interactional and sequential import as well as corrective functions. The analysis presented in this study is based on two psychotherapy sessions conducted by the same psychotherapist working within the theoretical framework of Relationship-Focused Integrative Psychotherapy.

Symbolic Annihilation or Alternative Femininity? The (Linguistic) Portrayal of Women in Selected Polish Advertisements The year 1989 marks the beginning of sweeping political, economic and social changes in Poland. Since that time an expansion of women into top professional positions can be observed. Data from the last national census (2002) clearly indicate that women in Poland are better educated than their male counterparts, increasingly careeroriented as well as aggressively pursuing managerial occupations. A modern woman is, by popular belief, no longer obliged to conform to the so-called dominant (Coates 1997) or emphasized (Connell 1987) [i.e. hegemonic] form of femininity. There appears to be greater social latitude for her professional development. The paper explores whether print advertisements (playing a crucial role in the construction of social identities) of certain products incorporate new powerful discourse of femininity. The three advertised products and services (cars, telephones, and banking) selected for the analysis have been commonly associated in Poland with the dominant form of masculinity. Consequently, it is interesting to examine whether women function there, and if so, how. The analyzed advertisements have been collected over the period of one year from three magazines addressed to the emerging Polish middle class. Drawing on Goffman's concepts of function ranking and ritualization of subordination as well as Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), I will attempt to determine whether the selected print advertisements reflect the new femininity in Poland.

Poland, as a young conservative democracy, is witnessing an unprecedented amount of public debate where ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ figure prominently. Both, however, tend to be perceived as foreign imports and thus fiercely contested. Consequently, the role of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) materials as well as teachers as potential mediators of markedly different Anglophone socio-politics is of paramount importance. What is more, the only Polish research examining the portrayal of women in EFL materials is that by Jaworski (1986), who exposed the abundance of sexism in EFL textbooks available in Poland at that time. Regrettably, ‘sexuality’ as a culturally (but not linguistically) important identity category was not addressed or recognised in the broad Polish educational context until 2012 (Świerszcz 2012). This chapter reports on two studies conducted as part of the research project entitled “Investigating Gender and Sexuality in the ESL classroom: Raising publishers', teachers' and students' awareness”. The aim of the first study was to qualitatively scrutinize the discursive and multimodal construction of gender, gender relations, and sexuality in two leading illustrated Primary School EFL textbooks in Poland, along with the accompanying workbooks and teacher’s books. To this end the analytical methods of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989; Lazar 2005, 2014), Multimodal Discourse Analysis (see e.g. Giaschi 2000; Guo 2004; O’Halloran 2004; Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006) and the concept of critical heteronormativity (Motschenbacher 2010, 2011) were utilized. The analyses focused on the representation of the social roles of men and women, boys and girls in EFL materials. They also demonstrated different textual manifestations of heteronormativity. ‘Gender critical points’ (Sunderland et al. 2002) – identified in the first study - were drawn on in the second study. We also extended Sunderland et al.’s (2002) concept by introducing the notion of ‘gender-emerging points’, which we believe enriches the analytical apparatus by highlighting the dynamic character of classroom interactions and thus the central role of teachers. Here we used audio-recorded primary school classroom interactions to demonstrate how the identified ‘gender critical points’ are addressed and how ‘gender-emerging points’ surface and/or are made (ir-)relevant in the classroom setting. Thus the analysis focused on gendered ‘talk around the text’ emerging in teacher-student interactions to explore negotiation, challenge and/or rejection and ‘uptake’ of gender roles and discourse. To this end methods and insights from critical linguistic analysis were used along with Sunderland’s (this volume) agenda for future research on gender representation in foreign language textbooks.

Self-disclosure is endemic to psychotherapy. Though clients themselves disclose their experiences and emotionala states during the course of a psychotherapya session, they typically do so with extensive prodding on the part of their therapists. Thus, the therapist’s interactional role is an agentive one, facilitating a client’s verbalization of therapeutically-relevant material. In this article we will discuss how the therapist manages such facilitation locally when the client (unexpectedly) ceases his/her self-disclosure, often at potentially therapeutically relevant moments. As a locally managed interactional practice, the therapist’s intervention resumes the client’s self-disclosure. Since such intervention emerges amidst ongoing, emotionally-loaded revelations on the part of the client, they should be interactionally aligned with the client’s contribution. This paper describes how the psychotherapist enables the client to verbalize significant aspects of self, aspects that may never before have been verbalized or, if verbalized, failed to elicit any empathetic response from an interested listener. This paper presents how specific communicative strategies and language forms take on therapeutic value in the discussed context, underlining that the communicative function is not pre-ordained but rather remains to be actively constructed in discourse. Data taken from a corpus of audio recordings of actual therapy sessions conducted in August and October, 2004, document the practical application of a Relational Psychotherapy approach based on such categories of methods as, among others, inquiry, attunement, and involvement (Erskine et al. 1999).