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Running Head: OTHER CONVERSATIONS?
Some other conversations of counselling
Tom Strong PhD
Division of Applied Psychology
University of Calgary
A presentation to the New Zealand Psychological Society conference,
Hamilton, New Zealand
August 21, 2007
All correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Tom Strong,
Division of Applied Psychology, University of Calgary, 2500
University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4
or strongt@ucalgary.ca
Special thanks to The Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada, the New Zealand Psychological Society, Andy
Lock, Karen Frewin, Ian Evans & Robbie Busch.

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Abstract
Perhaps the most taken for granted activity in counselling is conversation. So, considering how clients and psychologists use language while talking with each other can be a useful focus of attention. One view of counselling involves moving increasingly to prescriptive interview protocols, ways to “correctly” or validly assess and intervene. I will elaborate five 'other' conversational helping genres alongside this one. These include: 1) discourse coordination, 2) social justice conversations, 3) resource-focused conversations, 4) poetic conversations, and 5) institutional conversations. The focus will be on taken for granted, as well as intentionally generative, conversational practices useful to such conversations. These will be exemplified through both clinical examples and research passages from therapeutic dialogues. The address concludes by focusing on how psychologists can use their institutional conversations to sustain resourceful dialogues within their profession and with their clients.

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The general feature of human life I want to evoke is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.
Charles Taylor, 1991, p. 33
I want to discuss counselling as a conversational activity. For me, the general notion that counselling is primarily conversation is problematically taken for granted. The causal stuff of counselling is typically explained other ways and that leaves what counsellors and psychologists primarily do as they work with clients obscured. Just as we use conversations to construct new understandings and actions with clients, important professional and cultural conversations construct understandings and actions that shape how we listen and talk with clients. Conversation is anything but a benign activity but once psychologists start to answer some basic questions about why this is the case things get complicated and sometimes controversial. I will be approaching conversation from discourse theory and discourse analysis research, approaches generally not taken up in psychology, until recently. These ways of considering and researching conversation, I will propose, offer ways that can enhance counselling with clients.
I have titled my presentation “Some other conversations of counselling” for a number of reasons. First, I think it is important to think of counsellors at the nexus of many conversations where they can be helpful – not just in the conversations they have one-on-one with clients.
Second, I want to engage you in a discussion about what I see us doing with our talking and listening in these many conversations where we have influence. More specifically, I want to look at how we use conversation to initiate, and coordinate understandings and actions. Here I will also get somewhat conceptual and micro in focus. Third, I want to take up a concern from critical psychology that rankles many in our profession: that our focus on the wellbeing of individuals

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 4 can make us myopic and complicit when it comes to socially unjust practices. Fourth, while most counsellors readily acknowledge clients’ resourcefulness, I want to focus more directly on how they elicit and mobilize that resourcefulness in their conversations with clients. We are not a deficit-oriented profession yet we may under-estimate the potentials of what our conversations with clients can construct and activate. Fifth, and this partly relates to my last point, I will expand on the point made by Taylor in my lead-off quote, that sometimes good counselling helps clients find language most apt for them in describing problems and articulating potential solutions. Poetics may seem like a flaky word for describing some of what we do, or could be doing. But that would be dismissive of the exacting reflection on and rigorous use of language that goes into coming up with apt and viable descriptions of problems and solutions. Finally, I want to talk about the bigger institutional and cultural conversations that shape our understandings and ways of practice. Conferences are great places for talking about or participating anew within these conversations, particularly when we take from them ways to practice more effectively in ways that fit our values and capabilities.
Backdrop
Hermeneutic scholars (e.g., Gadamer, 1988) suggest that to properly understand a phenomenon means to relate it to the context from which it became possible. My words here are possible because of many conversations – with family and friends, clients, with students, academic colleagues, professional peers, with great writing, and with institutional settings – that
I can refract for you into what you are now hearing. As a counsellor for over 25 years, I have made a transition familiar to many of you: a search for counselling’s certainties followed by a more humble appreciation for the complexities of our craft. I completed my doctorate and first years of practice as a counselling psychologist during the heady days where social

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 5 constructionist and postmodern ideas and practices were on the rise. In these ideas and practices I saw new resources for collaborative and resourceful dialogues with clients. My practice involved seeing diverse clients, many from First Nations communities, with diverse concerns from across a huge region of northwestern British Columbia. I encountered ‘my’ clients as I participated in community life, so it seemed a perfect ecology for accountable practice.
I was also an idea nerd and sought conversations with colleagues about our work, our challenges, and what inspired us. While conferences and books fired me up about narrative
(White & Epston, 1990), solution-focused (de Shazer, 1994), and collaborative language systems
(Anderson, 1997) approaches to therapy – it was clear to me that more was going on in these approaches than innovative techniques. Eventually, I found myself at that postmodern crossroads many struggle with: how to reconcile the new ideas and practices I was learning about with those in psychology’s mainstream. While my primary training had been in family systems approaches, it became clear to me that a continent of ideas had escaped my attention in graduate school.
With the advent of online listserves my conversations expanded to people across the globe, and linked me up with Andy Lock at Massey University where I now teach part-time.
Andy was starting up a discursive therapies program (see http://therapy.massey.ac.nz/ ) and suggested I join him in teaching a discourse theories course. Little did I realize at the time, the rich breadth of ideas that inform the discursive therapies. So began another phase of my education, one that saw me leave 11 years of full time practice, and jump over to academic life
(it’s a good place to learn as well as teach I found out). While discourse theory helped school me further in the ideas behind discursive approaches therapy (e.g., Foucault, 2006; Wittgenstein,
1953), in my research I decided to look microscopically at therapeutic discourse. Alongside this work, I was also fortunate to practice at the Calgary Family Therapy Centre, with Karl Tomm

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(see Strong & Tomm, 2007) and a wonderful group of student interns, some of whom have become partners in research. Cumulatively, these experiences bring me to the macro and micro perspectives on counselling I will share with you today. In particular, I invite you to join me in seeing the work we do as occurring within many conversations we shape and are shaped by. My ongoing efforts toward optimizing our participation in these conversations inspire this paper.
Conversation and social coordination
Something obvious but generally overlooked is that conversation is our primary way of working out the normal stuff of coexisting together. The languages we develop for these purposes are anything but fixed. But the complexities run deeper than might, at first consideration, seem apparent. Social constructionists (Gergen, 1999; Hacking, 1999) and ethnomethdologists (e.g., Garfinkel, 1867; Heritage, 1984) see our using language in taken for granted ways in our relationships as quite a social accomplishment. Travel anywhere where people speak a different language, even a different local discourse, and this becomes obvious.
The upside and downside of such accomplishments troubled Ludwig Wittgenstein throughout his life. Initially, (Wittgenstein, 1961) he sought a perfect language free of ambiguity to describe experience, across different scientific realms – a correct language. He later abandoned this project to consider the diverse conversations people took up in different “forms of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953). Inside these conversations, these forms of life were distinct ways of understanding and relating – even in using a common mother tongue. There is no denying that a single language one could use correctly would, at first, make life less complicated. But, even inside a language like English people are up to different things and need to adapt language and ways of talking specific to those things. Controversies arise when trying to come up with best ways of putting things. How shall one correctly talk about grief, for example?

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My digression underscores a tension Ian Hacking (1999) sees as good for professions like ours: we want the best outcomes modern scientific realists offer but not at the expense of the critiques and imaginative conceptualizations offered by social constructionists. This realistconstructionist tension not only challenges psychologists, it plays out in the conversations of our clients and in the cultural conversations that shape their lives. Our varied languages and ways of talking can offer a reliable “common ground” (Clark, 1996) for talking. But, just as maps need to be upgraded to best reflect the territories they represent when there have been changes, humans aren’t well served should they fossilize or fetishize their meanings and ways of conversing
(Newman & Holzman, 1997). Wittgenstein’s issue later in life was how we could best make language serve particular purposes in going forward in life together. This means coordinating our use of words and conversation, not legislating (Bauman, 1993) a particular version of either.
Coordinating conversation means welcoming differences and finding ways to make them mutual and forward moving. At first glance many of these differences seem easy to pass over.
People can loosely use the same words and be roughly on the same page with each other. They bring different styles and genres of talk, and still fare ok when conducting their conversational business. But matters where precise understandings, actions and evaluations are sought require exacting conversations. Psychologists often have such exacting conversations and I’d contend that they, not clients, need to be the flexible speakers and listeners in therapeutic dialogues.
Let me offer an example of coordination issues in psychological conversations. A graduate student I supervised researched how “self-esteem” features in the conversations of addictions clients and therapists (Doyle, 2007). For clients, the range of meanings was wide and many made no connection between the term and either addiction or recovery. By contrast, in the treatment literature “self-esteem” had precise meanings and presumed causality, as reflected in

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 8 counselling curricula which specified how clients and counsellors were to talk, irrespective of clients’ understandings and language. In effect, clients and therapists were talking past each other. Clients had to learn the therapists’ language for conversations that would not necessarily generalize beyond client-therapist interactions. Should such a difference in language use matter?
Our metaphors for what we see occurring in conversation shape our attitudes and participation in conversations (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). If we see conversation as a matter of information transmission and reception, we won’t be as concerned about how we talk or listen as we might if we see conversation as involving both relational and informational components.
Rapport, for example, is far from a static achievement in counselling; it comes with how words, gestures, vocal tones, speeds of talking and so on are responsively coordinated. Janet Bavelas points out that people’s efforts to share experiences simply stop without such responsiveness
(Bavelas, Coates, & Johnson, 2000). In my field of research, discourse analysis, conversation is seen as a performance of meaning and close attention is paid to what goes into the performance of both parties. Conversation is how we coordinate our relationships and move forward together
(Strong & Tomm, 1997). The well worn metaphor of dialogue as a dance suggests there are many ways to step on the toes of clients if we expect them to fit our choreography and not see it as something we have to conversationally work out on an ongoing basis.
Social Justice Conversations
For eleven years I practiced in northern British Columbia (Canada) where I saw clients presenting a wide range of presenting concerns. They stretched my sense of what was meant by the term, “clinical”. Having been trained in family systems approaches to therapy, I related to a comment from Jay Haley (1976) about working at the systemic level one can best address problems. Permit me a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean.

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I once saw a woman in her mid-30’s because she recently began to have panic attacks. As we discussed her circumstances, and the history leading to the onset of these attacks, she recounted a circumstance where she had been the only nurse on duty for two wards in a small rural hospital. The two wards, geriatric and pediatric, were each on a wing of her hospital, with her nursing station strategically placed at the juncture of these two wings. A year earlier this nursing station had two on-duty nurses but cut-backs had occurred and staffing was reduced. The evening preceding the onset of her panic attacks was a particularly difficult one. In attempting to ensure optimal service to the most needy, she had placed babies in bassinettes on her desk in the station. But, on this evening a geriatric patient went into cardiac arrest, requiring her to leave the babies and other patients to attend to the patient until other help could come in. The help was long in coming and the geriatric patient unfortunately died. The panic attacks began after coming off shift, having a bad night’s sleep, and waking up to a thought that she had been unprofessional in not being able to respond to the needs of her patients, particularly the babies. This, she recognized, was an ongoing concern given the hospital staffing situation.
I want to digress for a moment. This client clearly was presenting symptoms of anxiety, and I could have helped her to address these symptoms with stress management techniques. But,
I, too, had a visceral reaction to this circumstance, and shared it. I asked how she felt about continuing to work in her under-staffed situation. This elicited a long rant occasionally interrupted by disparaging comments about her lack of professionalism. Again, I reacted viscerally, asking about maintaining professional standards of care should understaffing continue. She later, unadvised, went to her union who challenged the hospital staffing issue.
A few years earlier, I had been speaking with a First Nations clients about her progress in establishing a satisfying life, having come out of an abusive relationship, a history of child

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 10 sexual abuse, and a family circumstance where some of her kids had been placed in foster care.
During our talk I’d asked about her ability to attend a career development seminar that had interested her and she told me that she would have to consult her schedule. She then pulled out a daybook showing the many appointments she had with social service professionals – a schedule she likened to meeting the requirements of a job. When I asked about her “job description” it became clear how fragmented and busy it was, how each involvement with these professionals seemed to pull her (and her family) in different directions. This sometimes occurred when she had been directed by one professional to do something another professional disapproved of and could reprimand her for, such as through cutting back social assistance funds to her family, or visits with her kids. Seen independently, each ‘helping’ relationship was fine, but in combination this client felt paralyzed at times by their conflicting directives. Eventually all helpers met to coordinate their services, but with modest success given differences in mandates.
These are examples of client situations many counsellors face and it might seem a misnomer to categorize them as social justice concerns. Normally, social justice refers to larger scale issues, like discrimination or oppression, matters seemingly best resolved politically or legally. Many counsellors are comfortable in advocating for clients in unjust circumstances. But, they, for borrowing heavily from disciplines focused on individual biology and psychology can sometimes fall prey to an oft-heard criticism of counsellors; about them focusing solely on individuals and thereby becoming complicit in expecting and ‘helping’ clients adjust to unjust realities (e.g., Hillman & Ventura, 1993; Prilleltensky, 1994; Waldegrave, Tamasese, Tuhuka, &
Campbell, 2003). People sometimes ask me if what clients say sometimes upsets me. I answer that I tend to be most affected by their telling me, or my sensing, what family therapist Lyman
Wynne once described as “dumb cruelty”, cruelty I felt as helpless in addressing as had my

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 11 clients. “Dumbness” is a matter of perspective, but cruelty can be highly evident but more often subtly present and easily talked past if not inquired about.
Many problems raised in counselling can relate to social justice concerns. For example, in Calgary where I practice, it is common to see parents working 2-3 low paying jobs, while their children scarcely see them. For counsellors easily riled, there seems to be no shortage of unjust circumstances. So, I am encouraged to see Aotearoa/New Zealand at the forefront of community and collective actions on issues that transcend what clients and counsellors can tackle on their own. I am also encouraged by the Canadian Counselling Association for starting a social justice chapter that offers consultation and collective action. For academics, discussing social justice concerns is common in conferences and in journals. But, on counselling’s front line, counsellors find many constraints to addressing social justice problems - if they look beyond client symptoms to circumstances that make such symptoms understandable. While there are always things we can do to make our service policies, professional ethics and standards, and collaborations with colleagues more humane and just, most of us are understandably rankled by criticisms that we can be complicit in bigger picture injustices by not challenging them. Feeling helpless or being knowingly inactive, in addressing the “dumb cruelty” of socially unjust circumstances is a ticket to “compassion fatigue” (Figley & Smith, 2005) in our field.
Competence-focused conversations
It is easy to lose sight of our clients’ competence and resourcefulness. As Stephen
Gilligan (1997) writes, problems induct otherwise competent and resourceful people into hypnotic trances of incompetence, deficit and despair. The seeming cost of admission into counselling is typically some symptom, some skill or knowledge deficit, or some sense of failure. Counsellors come to their interactions with clients bearing clinical wisdom, toolkits of

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 12 interventions and recommendations, and a generous combination of hope and desire to bring sought after differences to clients’ lives. They are there to share what they know and can do for clients. So, many struggle with the recent advocacy by some approaches to counselling, to focus on clients’ competence and resourcefulness. This can be somewhat of a U-Turn for most clients and counsellors. Just as we wouldn’t expect to conversationally focus on what’s going well in our lives in discussions with our physicians, clients don’t expect to be asked by us about their competence and resourcefulness. Yet, a generation of positive psychologists, motivational interviewers, appreciative inquirers, and solution focused and narrative therapists have been engaging clients in precisely these kinds of conversations.
Part of this recent shift to competence and resource-focused conversation came with a view that the counselling interview itself could be interventive as opposed to a mere medium for information exchanges or directives between clients and counsellors (Tomm, 1988). Asking someone how they kept things from getting worse when enduring a difficult life event brings forth a very different conversation than asking them how they were aversely affected by that event. Each sets up a different conversational trajectory. Resourceful conversations, for Steve deShazer (1994) tend to be quite different from problem-focused ones. There is no getting to the bottom of what clients present for deShazer because the bottom is always another description. A question thus arises, if one takes this path, as to what descriptions should be brought forth in counselling. Those with a social constructionist orientation to practice, tend to use resourceful dialogue to talk viable competence and resourcefulness into understanding and action. Others see resources and competencies as something to be formally assessed, to be later woven into a treatment plan – as add ons to some evidence-supported intervention.

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Like many, I came to the social constructionist approaches to counselling because of this collaborative and resourceful focus. The interview became a place to talk with clients so as to break the trance that went with their problems. But, it was also an opportunity to converse in ways that could reconnect clients with what they could do, with things from their own experience that they could identify and mobilize. I want to mention the important work of my colleague
Allan Wade (1997) who, if he was here, would say therapists are too preoccupied with the presumed effects negative experiences have on clients. This presumption has them, and clients who share this presumption, ignore the resourceful ways clients respond to adverse events. So,
Allan engages clients in discussions regarding their resistance to unwanted life events and circumstances, and their efforts to address things they find unjust.
Some here may already be familiar with the story I published with Tom Flynn, a former client (Strong & Flynn, 2000). I saw Tom, a retired barber and Korean War veteran, for a single consultation a decade ago. He came with concerns about chronic anxiety and difficulties in his marriage. I asked him what he put his symptoms of anxiety down to and he recounted witnessing the massacre of hundreds of North Korean prisoners of war. He felt powerless to do much about this, and when he went to talk about what he’d witnessed his concerns were dismissed. He became symptomatic, disillusioned, and temporarily turned to alcohol before being discharged.
He found it hard to talk about his experiences which were often met by others’ incredulity. When he went to try to connect with others who were there at the time of the massacre he was told by the US Armed Forces that records had been lost in a fire. Tom felt truly alone with his incredible story. Mindful of the power of interviews to talk things into significance and action, I asked Tom point-blank if he wanted his story to die with him. This question had a rather profound effect on him and we began to customize an intervention based on something I’d heard David Epston once

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 14 describe. Tom recounted his story on tape, had this transcribed, and legally notarized. He then sent out this legal account out to War historians in a few Canadian universities, to hear if there was anything they knew of the event, or his colleagues. The response was overwhelming for
Tom. He had War historians validate his account of the event, direct him to colleagues (including the wife of the officer who put an end to the massacre), and support him further in making connections. Tom also began to have his local press and later national media take notice. I found all this out when Tom called me personally about 8 months afterward to update me. In the spirit of wanting to get his story out to even more people he agreed to join me in writing up what I’ve described to you. I have no idea if Tom’s marriage improved but he sure felt better about his horrifying experience for where he took it after our consultation.
I share this story because I think it illustrates what I mean by resourceful dialogues, for how the interview itself got us both resourceful. But, I think it says something about working with clients where, for Tom Andersen (1995), they got stuck in “stalled dialogues” that can be restarted once a way can be found. Another reason is that part of my orientation was that Tom
Flynn had competencies he had yet to bring to bear on his presenting concern. I didn’t have to correct him or teach him anything and his anxiety symptoms abated for the actions he took.
Resourceful dialogues require resourcefulness from therapists as well. They need to be evocative, plausible, and responsive in ways that can’t be pre-scripted. They also need to be conducted from a belief in clients’ competence alongside whatever else we might offer them.
Poetic conversations
The more uncompromising psychologists became in their exclusive commitment to the requirements of scientific language the more impoverished their descriptions became, at least from the point of view of ordinary usage.

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Kurt Danziger, 1997, p. 192
I’d like to turn to the remarkable 18 th century thinking of Giambattista Vico (1984) who struggled with the dominant science of his day over where humans and meaning fit into scientific understanding. One of Vico’s preoccupations was with what he called poetic wisdom. For him, humans needed to be more wary and generative with the things they create and then take for granted, such as language or numbers. As our creations, they are accomplishments we can reflect upon and modify, without minimizing how helpful such accomplishments can initially be. But, we need to remember that Vico was writing in the time when Descartes was describing experience as best understood as if it was occurring across the street, through a window of detachment. It was also a time when Newton portrayed the universe and all within it as a knowable machine one could tinker with. Against this backdrop, Vico sounded quaint in his plea for keeping human meanings and cultural institutions still in the scientific picture. A further example of the things Vico was pointing at was raised recently by Harvard historian of science,
Peter Galison. Galison (2003), in his book
Einstein’s clocks, Poincaré’s maps
, recounted the intense debates over the 24 hour clock, and where Mean time would be physically located. A combination of developments in terms of transportation and communication seemed to necessitate such a development, but, because it was a global human construction, it required some serious politicking. The notion that I would lose a day traveling here wouldn’t have made sense without Einstein’s and Poincaré’s (and other scientists and politicians’) accomplishments.
Vico felt the cost of such human accomplishments meant we often came up against poetic challenges where there was “linguistic poverty”, a need to articulate something better.
Discourse theorists and analysts are also preoccupied with what humans create and then take for granted, particularly with how people use some words for experience over others. It is

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 16 clear we can’t articulate experience any way we want. Others won’t let us say what they don’t find understandable or acceptable. Good poets, however, have a creative knack with words.
Counsellors aren’t bad with words themselves but can sometimes be as aware of their use of them as fish are of the water in which they swim. Vico’s poetic wisdom can become one of the sensibilities they bring to their dialogues with clients, an ear and a readiness for dialogues that can bring the most apt words to clients’ inchoate or inadequately articulated experiences.
To grasp what I am getting at, it can help to see language in the way John Shotter once described (1993a), as linguistic prostheses to make our way about physical and social reality.
Different cultures use different languages fine so it is not a case of one word or way of understanding and putting things correctly. The cognitive therapy strategy of reframing gets closer to the spirit of what I am raising. But, I can’t monologically reframe what isn’t plausible for another person; that would be like me pronouncing you all Canadians. We have to work up our alternative meanings together through how we talk and come to understand each other. It is in that kind of conversational work that I see poetic conversations sometimes useful in counselling. There are lots of places where shared language has come up short for clients; lots of places that are not rationally understood - like grief, powerful yearnings, or love. But sometimes we can get ensnared in our own language or human constructions as the Y2K scare showed us.
If we were to listen to dialogue in a foreign language we would hear where its hot spots and its stalled places are. Back in our own language I am not so sure we would hear the same things as we tend to get a bit too focused on the semantic meanings of words while listening past how words are put. Poetic conversations tend to pick up on these performative details of talk, joining in giving elaboration to that which seems inadequately voiced for clients. I once saw a young boy with his father, after the boy had been refused attendance by the school principal for

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 17 fighting. In speaking with the boy, it was clear he felt something unfair had occurred that led to his expulsion. In those days, I consulted clients with a laptop on my knee, entering key things in what they told me, so that they could later have a printed off letter of highlights of the interview.
I included clients in deciding what were the highlights and in the case of this boy we arrived at one when he said how “pissed off” he was at another boy and his teacher. I asked the boy if he felt I should include his words in my letter and he agreed. For some reason I then asked what sized font should go into capturing the strength of these words for him, and he came over and guided me in getting things just right. In the end, he got a three page letter from me: the first page of details up to being pissed off, one page that had “pissed off” in bolded 72 point font, and the final page wrapping up details of our conversation.
I share this anecdote because I think there is a very important poetic thing we do, with our voice, our words, our gestures, and any other communicative means we use to get our communications right with clients. Wittgenstein once said that for there to be knowledge there needs to be acknowledgment (Wittgenstein, 1972). Some of what I’ve been describing as
“poetic” conversations fits in here, and in the story of the boy. But, there is another part which is even more improvised and often consequential and this is about going into overdetermined and underdetermined meanings with clients to collaboratively come up with meanings that are more apt and viable for clients. If humans are the ones who bestow meaning on experience, surely they can overdo and underdo their meaning-making, sometimes with descriptions that fit earlier but need an update to become more apt later on. Evolution has pointed out what happens when any development is coasted on, not adapted to in ways that permit individuals and groups to go on.
The DSM is one example of where descriptions, such as homosexuality, have been introduced

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 18 and then outlived their currency. Vico’s poetic wisdom is about keeping human meanings and institutions current and at our service.
Canadian psychiatrist, Laurence Kirmayer (1984, p. 259), once wrote “The sufferer is a poet in search of metaphors adequate to explain his predicament”. This captures some of what I meant by underdetermined meaning. I once saw a client who, at 23 found himself back home living in his parents’ basement while he completed his graduate degree. This was a case of financial necessity, but with it came a lot of frustration as this young man’s parents felt they still had a parenting job to do with him. After talking about his predicament for some time I asked him to come up with an apt name for it. He paused for a moment, and then smiling he said he was “paying emotional rent” by staying with his parents. On the overdetermined side of meaning one finds many circumstances where words are used but, like hollow rituals, they have lost their meaning. The Russian literary and dialogic scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), felt that our job as meaning-makers, was to “people” our words with our intentions and that dialogue was where we could make words come alive or use them as if they were corpses. Clients offer many descriptions that sound like corpses, particularly when they feel stuck or discouraged. Words like
“depressed” can seem like hollow abstractions. Often inside a big description is a smaller, more vital description seeking articulation, for the lived specifics it can talk into being. Poetic conversations are where meanings can be reflected upon, optimized and vitalized.
Institutional conversations
By this point my social constructionist agenda should be clear. I see our conversations as central to where we have come from, what we do, and what could be different in our lives and the lives of our clients. But, we don’t have these conversations in social or cultural vacuums. To paraphrase Harold Garfinkel (1967), our conversations are shaped by, and shaping of, the social

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 19 contexts and institutions in which we find ourselves. I use the word “institution” broadly for how it can refer to a unique combination of understandings and actions taken by people within social and cultural groupings. The New Zealand Psychological Society is one such institution, as are the service contexts in which we work, the communities in which we live, and so on. Institutions have their underdetermined and overdetermined aspects. But, they are our institutions and as such we have a say on how they conduct their (our) affairs and develop as institutions.
Turning to psychology as an institution, one finds a profession, a body of knowledge, and a set of practices that are kept in conversational circulation. This is no mere recycling of traditions either. The conversations of psychology are diverse, sometimes fractious, grounded in scientific and socio-political developments, and we tend to engage a wide spectrum of members.
Our conversations, looked upon historically, do not articulate a continuous narrative with a thematically unchanging plotline. There have been lots of twists and turns, lots of thematic strands to our profession’s story and, to a large extent, we have articulated our professional identity and practices in ways that reflect the interests of the culturally varied people we serve.
This is why one can find 56 different Divisions within the American Psychological Association
(APA), with some Divisions approaching psychology in ways that differ dramatically. Since my days as an undergraduate in the mid 1970s Psychology has recognized women as different from men, non-Caucasians as different from Caucasians, and qualitative research as a useful way to research psychological questions. It has housed great debates on the role of theory in informing research and practice. It has kept up with technological developments like the internet and learning online. And, it has revised its codes of ethics and diagnostic terms several times. We are not a group to keep mum about the things that matter to us, and that we think need updating or optimizing. Conferences like this one are part of this conversational process.

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Our clients’ lives, and the lives of those served by our research, are also shaped by institutions. But, my sense is that they often are not able to be as influential with the institutions which shape their lives as we are by talking for how we want psychology to be. Within our own contexts of practice we and the people we serve can find ourselves estranged from how practice itself can occur. The policies and procedures which shape our work are not always in sync with the values our profession endorses, and it is not uncommon for me to talk to practitioners who speak of feeling at odds with the systems that employ then prescribe their practices. In North
America things have become quite disillusioning for many professionals in this regard.
Economic and institutional realities can collide with our professional values and even our ethics.
For clients and the public at large things can be even worse.
Canadian psychologist, Vance Peavy (1984), described counsellors as social and institutional brokers and negotiators, professionals with gifts of gab and knowledge needed to talk larger institutional changes into being. For example, thanks largely to efforts by Martin
Seligman (2002), mainstream psychology made room for “positive psychology”. But, in the
Board rooms, internet listserves, news media, and other venues beyond our office walls, psychologists and counsellors are, or could be, changing the institutions so influential in their lives and the lives of the people they serve. You know all of this, and yet it is easy to do a downperiscope and focus on what is immediately before us. The demands of work can be such that we feel we have no time or energy to do more. Meanwhile part of what we and clients face can be generated by institutions in need of our poetic wisdom.
Institutions are typically clunky organizations concerned with general aims, most of them well-intended. Counselling is an activity involving many particulars: particular clients, particular circumstances and concerns, and our own uniquenesses. Not surprisingly, there are ‘collisions’

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 21 between the general and the particular. At best these collisions serve as grist for modifications to the institutions. At worst they highlight enduring forms of oppression, conflict or indifference.
James Hillman (Hillman and Ventura, 1991) says that therapists serve as the cultural early warning systems for institutions and circumstances that need reworking. They can discern when institutions and social circumstances are not working and hopefully don’t pathologize their clients when the pathology is happening on a social or cultural level. Recently, the Canadian
Broadcasting Company did a radio special on health care in poverty stricken countries. They interviewed newly trained physicians in the Dominican Republic who had their expensive training covered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. When asked about the number one health concern they saw the physicians cited intestinal problems related to the poor drinking water in the community they were part of. When further asked how much it would cost to rectify the water issue, one physician ventured that the cost would be less than the subsidized training of the eight physicians. Institutionally, health care was organized around these physicians (and they needed more physicians) when a more elegant solution to a major health concern was available.
I am not out to make institutions into monsters. That would mean declaring ourselves, the participants in them, monsters as well. I think there are, however, many ways our conversations can shape the bigger conversations that shape our lives and the lives of our clients. Like the example of polluted water, there are often ways in which institutions can make changes that improve the lives of many in the process. There is a view sometimes taken up in the sociological literature, that institutions can define our understandings and behaviours totally (e.g., Goffman,
1961). Some discourse analysts, following Foucault (2006), can take a similarly simplistic view if they overlook and fail to join clients contesting (however subtly) what they experience as unjust (de Certeau, 2002), or if they see discourses as totalizing (Levinas, 1985) clients’ lives. By

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 22 saying this I am not suggesting for a moment that institutions and their communicative extensions, discourses, are not hugely influential and constraining in peoples’ lives. This can be the case in circumstances where clients’ or our resourcefulness is constrained or insufficient.
But, we are neither pawns of institutions, nor can we be dismissed as abettors of their dirty work, if institutions engage in such work. Participating in and influencing institutions means taking up what John Shotter (1993b) once described as the “cultural politics of everyday life”. We are involved in these politics whether we like it or not.
Concluding comments
As a discourse analyst, and someone who long ago adopted the conversational metaphor as central to my work as a psychologist and educator, I have been describing how I see conversation as one of our most central, yet taken for granted, activities. On a big picture level it can help to see our scientific and other professional activities as hinging on conversation.
Academic discourse is not installed by authors in our heads; we, in a sense, converse with it, taking from it what we find useful. Similarly, my talk here today aims to contribute to further conversations that I hope will feature between us and among you at and beyond this conference.
When the opportunity to speak here was offered to me, I was asked to reference my work with Massey University’s Discursive Therapies Postgraduate Diploma program. It seems odd to say this now, but I probably owe more to Massey and Professor Andy Lock, for pulling me into academic life, than I do to my more recent academic employers. As I have talked today I have shared where my conversations, reading, teaching and practice of discursive ideas have taken me. Names like Vico, Shotter, Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Goffman, Vygotsky, Foucault and others are part of the pantheon of thinkers we cover in the Massey program. Our aim is to promote a

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 23 view of being human and practicing therapy that is profoundly conversational. My motivation to learn more about discursive ideas arose, in part from a concern I indirectly spoke about throughout my paper to this point. So, let me shift gears and speak more directly about my motivations, and permit me some rhetorical license if I overstate my concern.
There are some in Psychology who feel that the conversations of practice should be prescripted. On the problem end, there are interview schedules laid out in decision tree fashion culminating in a diagnosis. On the intervention side are evidence based interventions. The extreme version of this sees the conversations of counselling mapped out in manuals. Since this is an emulation of medical practice we should understandably expect similar accompanying fallout. Malpractice is typically defined according to failure to adhere to established protocols like those becoming more prevalent in counselling and psychotherapy, so the question arises as to how significant a deviation from such protocols warrants malpractice. How tightly scripted must we get to be practicing appropriately? On the commercial side of things, a different set of issues is in motion, largely when it comes to financially administering service delivery. In Health
Maintenance Organizations in the US what is required is a diagnosis and, accordingly, certain treatment protocols, usually of brief duration, are approved – by non-psychiatrists and nonpsychologists (arguably the matrix fitting diagnoses to treatment, once established by research, need not require further professional judgment, thus opening rationing of treatment to nonclinician administrators). This orderly mapping of concerns into a language of symptoms and treatment protocols sounds like the perfect answer to a field that has proliferated over 400 therapies, with little quality control for the public it serves, only buyer beware caveats and the chance to take up psychologists on ethics concerns.

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 24
I serve on the Canadian Psychological Association’s national Ethics committee. There we are constantly approached to articulate ethical standards of practice in new areas. I have also just finished serving 4 years on my provincial College of Psychologists’ Practice Advisory
Committee where our focus is often on translating national ethics standards and codes of conduct into guidelines for practice. On both committees we have been faced with issues of how tightly practice should be prescribed on any given issue. This has been my way of participating in institutional conversations. But, it has also given me some sense of how diverse our field is, the kinds of hotspots where trouble shows up for psychologists, and the cultural politics involved in being a psychologist. On neither committee has anyone proposed my earlier doomsday scenario for the conversations of counselling. Parameters for these conversations are set, so that what is ethically in and out bounds can be clearly stated.
In the academy I encounter variations on similar themes. Should qualitative research be considered a source of evidence, for evidence-based practice? The APA thinks so (Levant,
2005). Should we restrict our coursework to only the most established of approaches to counselling? We don’t. To what extent are our graduates to use specific conversational skills in specific places in their interviews with clients? This varies. My point in recounting these contexts of institutional involvement is that there are robust conversations going on all the time about how we are to move forward as a profession. Narrow convergences on what practice should be like, like my doomsday scenario, seem anathema to psychologists and I see that as a kind of collective poetic wisdom. As Scott Miller and Barry Duncan (2004) cheekily point out, we can come to have better relationships with our treatment manuals than with our clients.
So, back to my paper’s title. I think there are many conversations the people we serve need to have with us. I am fearful that psychology could boil down to a narrow range of “correct

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 25 conversations” and abandon the poetic wisdom it has shown throughout its development. Some of this could occur based on a misunderstanding of communication, I say as a discourse analyst.
Specifically, conversation is more than an exchange of information between rational actors, or
‘minds in vats’ as Thomas Nagel once referred to this computer metaphor. It is a means by which people talk relationships, preferences and accomplishments into being and can be studied as such. Seen that way, the other kinds of conversations I have been describing logically follow.
The other conversations of counselling I have been describing follow from the notion that good conversation is a dialogic and not a monologic activity. Dialogic means, for Bakhtin
(1981), that the words in any of my dialogues are only part mine. Others have claims on them, including prior speakers, and those who will respond to them. They are not mere information to be transmitted and conversation is how we work out shared understandings and actions. But, as we have discussed, it also can inadvertently help to sustain unjust institutional and cultural circumstances, or it can be used in efforts to alter such conversations.
In closing, I am thankful for this opportunity to contribute to your conference dialogues on how conversation features as one of our primary professional activities. I arbitrarily picked five “other” conversations to speak about when there are more. We need to continually bring our poetic wisdom to professional conversations where there is a need for what Thomas Schwandt
(2002) described as “deliberative excellence”. I look forward to the many excellent conversations our profession will continue to have before us.

Other conversations? 4/13/2020 26
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