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THIS PAPER WILL DESCRIBE SOME of the implicit aims and functions of therapeutic questioning. It should shed some light on the quality and aims of the therapeutic encounter. My discussion will be confined to the linguistic form of questioning with the understanding that this leaves out much paralinguistic, non-verbal questioning.
What distinguishes questions in the therapy situation from questions in everyday discourse is their quality as interventions, i.e., as strategic moves in the development of the relationship between therapist and patient. The therapist pursues a strategy to realize a number of immediate and long-term goals. These goals (e.g., the fostering of trust between therapist and patient, the gaining of particular insights by the patient, the inculcation of a particular attitude of the patient toward him/herself, etc.) are often implicit or ambiguous in practice. An analysis of therapeutic questioning can reveal them explicitly.
As strategy, whether or not consciously intended by the therapist, questions in the therapy situation are by nature semantically opaque. That is, it is always reasonable to look for more than one level of meaning. By contrast, in everyday discourse it is not the usual assumption that there is more than one level of meaning or purpose in a question, although there may be, in fact. Moreover, the obverse of these propositions also holds. That is, although it is reasonable to assume that any given therapeutic question is functioning as an intervention, one must also remain open to the possibility that any given question's purposes are perfectly explicit and, relatively, non-strategic.