Responding to What Is Left Implicit: Psychotherapists’ Formulations and Understanding Checks After Clients’ Turn-Final Että (“That/So”).

This article examines a specific linguistic practice in psychotherapy in Finnish: ending a turn at talk with että ("that" or "so"). Making että the final item leaves some aspect of the turn implicit and invites the recipient somehow to deal with that implication. This happens in everyday interactions generally. However, whereas in everyday conversation the recipient usually does not explicate the implicit content of the turn, in psychotherapy the therapist may draw out different aspects of the implicit content and offer it to the client for confirmation. We will show that these practices are in service of addressing the problematic contents in the client's telling and in managing resistance. We argue that the ways in which therapists depart from the practices of everyday conversation to deal with the implicit can be seen as institutionally specific means of working with previously avoided themes and integrating them to the client's self. Data are in Finnish with English translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]