Co-experiencing Psychotherapy of F. Vasilyuk and Linguistic Turn in Social Sciences, Psychology and Psychotherapy

Abstract

Co-experiencing psychotherapy of F. Vasilyuk is considered in the context of the linguistic turn in social sciences in the second half of the twentieth century. The linguistic turn meant the change of research style under the influence of increased attention to everyday language. Language is viewed as a form of social action not so much representing reality as constructing it. The linguistic turn in psychology has led to the development of such theoretical and methodological approaches as discursive psychology, narrative psychology, narrative psychotherapy and to the development of such language-oriented methodologies as discourse analysis, narrative analysis, conversation analysis. The main idea of the article is that co-experiencing psychotherapy is a successor of this movement and contributes greatly to the development of language-oriented methodologies in psychology and psychotherapy. It is argued that in co-experiencing psychotherapy the unique methodology of discourse analysis has been proposed and much attention is paid to meaning-making and sense-making processes by means of everyday language. The paper also offers a new interpretation of lifeworlds as stylistics of narrative contemplation of experience. Based on the conversation analysis of training and counseling sessions held by F. Vasilyuk it is argued that the empathetic counseling strategy created in co-experiencing psychotherapy involves repeated reformulations of client statements which open up possibilities for changing the scale of an individual’s experiencing by means of employing the aesthetics of different genres.