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Whenever psychoanalysis or psychotherapy is successful, its success emerges from a dialogue in which one person tells a private, personal story while another listens and contributes to the telling of that story by asking questions or making comments with a spontaneous skill we only partly understand. When psychoanalysis works, after a series of such sessions, the patient discovers that life outside the sessions has become more satisfying than before. We therapists and analysts came to our profession to assist this process.
But it is no small wonder that we are ever successful. There may be a million theories why psychoanalysis should work, but the truth of the matter is that the meat and potatoes of the process, the character of the words we exchange in our dialogues, largely pass us by (Jones, 1997). That is, we are largely unaware of the moment-to-moment phrasing, the nuance of our conversation, the vocabulary and the way one comment feeds off of the next. These things easily slip by us—for we try to attend, naturally enough, to what we imagine to be the substance behind the words, not to the phrasing of our statements.
Yet, can we really imagine that the way we say things has no effect on the psychoanalytic process? Do we really think that it is just as good to voice our thoughts in any formulation whatsoever?
Those of us who have taken the linguistic turn see words as much more important than this. Words are not just the passive wrappings of our thoughts (Ogden, 1997). Rather, the words we select become active ingredients in our communications, not only informing people but also shaping what they are able to hear. Different formulations can sometimes make all the difference in the world.
Nevertheless, psychoanalysis largely ignores these important matters. Why is this so?
The problem, perhaps, is that, as a topic for scholarship, the subtleties of conversational language seem overwhelming. Studying such conversational nuance is like launching research on the micro-cu