A Linguistic Approach to Poetics and Cohesion of Self in Therapeutic Conversation
This self-cohesion and organisation of experience is often discussed in relation to verbal art, which in turn is associated with the construal of human experience, metaphor and poetic expression. A similar methodological approach to verbal art and psychotherapy text analysis through stylistic methods (‘science of poetics’) is also advocated by Meares et al (2005) and Butt et al (2014). In this research, the poetics of the therapeutic interaction are analysed from the perspective of cohesion, coherence and texture.
A linguistic analysis of cohesion and cohesive harmony (cf. Hasan; 1984;1985) is discussed in reference to the patterning of language in instances of therapeutic text. Measures of coherence are applied to the instance and held up against the system; in addition the semantic continuities and changes are shown with the local and global differences in coherence at varying levels of delicacy. Therapeutic text is also compared with verbal art and spoken discourse. The linguistic cohesion provides a resource for texture “in order for the discourse to come to life as a text” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976:299).
