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The Handbook of Conversation Analysis

Article  in  Language and Psychoanalysis · June 2013

DOI: 10.7565/landp.2013.003

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Book review

The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Jack Sidnell, & Tanya Stivers (Eds.).
Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, xvi + 844 pages, £120.00 (hardcover), ISBN
978-1-4443-3208-7.

Emotion in Interaction. Anssi Peräkylä, & Marja-Leena Sorjonen (Eds.). New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2012, 326 pages, £45.00 (hardcover), ISBN13: 978-0-19-
973073-5.

Reviewed by Michael B. Buchholz1

International Psychoanalytic University (IPU), Berlin/Germany

Reviewing Conversation Analysis (CA) “at the Century’s Turn”, Emanuel A. Schegloff
predicted the “further development of our understanding of the organization of talk and
other conduct in interaction itself” and to “register the particularities of its realization”
(Schegloff 1999, p. 142). John Heritage (1999), additionally, foresaw a future where
qualitative and quantitative approaches will “shift from basic CA to ‘applied’ analysis
and back again” (p. 73). Both predictions can be viewed as fulfilled when one opens the
two books under discussion here. These enormously rich volumes cannot be reviewed in
their entirety, I have to select certain contributions of relevance for researchers in
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. But I will try to give an impression of the books as a
whole.

“The Handbook of Conversation Analysis”, edited by well-known researchers in the

field, is divided into 5 parts. The first part studies “social interaction from a CA
Perspective”, its contributors lay the groundwork by presenting the historical and
academic origins of CA, debate the special kind of “naturalistic”, not researcher-driven,
data collection that is so characteristic of the field, discuss the methodology of
transcription and present basic CA methods of analyzing data. Any reader will feel
knowledgeably instructed, even if one knows the field. There is much to learn by these
excellent summaries.

The second part on “Fundamental Structures of Conversation” is on another kind of

basics, those of the theoretical type, such as turn construction (units), transition relevant
places, sequence organization and preference, repair and overall structural organization.
Just from reading the table of contents one can learn what a huge field of knowledge,
theory and data, has been collected here and what a consistent body of terminology,
secured in naturalistic data, has been able to be established in recent years.

The third part, “Key Topics in CA” demonstrates the networking of CA research activity.
Many people in cognitive science work on such topics as embodiment, on gaze and
emotion or affiliation – but nowadays most people connect these topics with

1
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Prof.


Michael
Buchholz.
E‐mail:
buchholz.mmb@t‐online.de

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neurobiology or brain science. With the help of naturalistic data, things here sometimes
look different than in the lab. McCabe et al. (2006) looked at the theory of “theory-of-
mind” using CA in naturalistic settings with schizophrenic patients and found these
patients to indeed have a theory-of-mind, but to use it differently. This is an important
correction to what is commonly assumed in similar work in brain and cognitive science.
Many corrections of that kind can be found in the articles of Part III in the “Handbook”.
Cognitive researchers see emotions as something produced in a person’s brain.
Ruusuvuori, however, shows “how people observably orient to an underlying affective
structure in conversation” (p. 336). By observing and co-constructing emotion as an
interactional resource and by attributing meaning to what is observed participants might
be considered the most sensitive scanners for each other’s emotion. This is an important
fact when psychotherapists of every kind begin to explore what they mean and do by
using the word “empathy”. Ruusuvuori has much to tell about this that might interest
readers of counseling professions, too.

Person reference, prosody, grammar and storytelling are names for research areas where
modern technologies of analyzing talk come to be applied. Gareth Walker finds
audiographic measurement to play an important role in analyzing turn-constructional
units. His conclusions on transcription conventions need to be debated seriously.
Participants react to these subtleties (which is something that can definitely be shown)
and this must have, the author concludes, consequences for the transcription system
introduced by Gail Jefferson following the mandate to put down in the transcription
“what you hear”. Obviously, there is much more to be heard – if it is made viewable by
audiographic technology. This overview of what happens in detail while we are talking is
instructive for the question of what “clinical facts” are (Tuckett 1993, Tuckett 2012).
There is much more in the psychoanalytic consulting room than what we can discuss
when we have case presentations based on memory protocols only.

Jenny Mandelbaum makes a contribution on “story telling” and includes “embodiment”

by summarizing CA research on recipient responses – through the body movement of
listeners. She is lead to the conclusion “that the particular practices used to tell stories in
institutional settings contribute to the constitution of the setting as an institutional one”
(p. 506) – obviously, there is something like a circularity between the institution and the
kind of practices observed in telling stories: who might dare say that this is not important
for psychoanalytic settings?

The impression of deep relevance for psychoanalysis is furthered in part IV, dedicated to
“Key contexts of Study in CA: Populations and Settings”. Medical communication or
analyses of conversation in the court- or classroom are “classical” topics in CA research.
But there is more. Mardi Kidwell summarizes CA research on “interaction among
children”. She presents data from a corpus of more than 500 hours of natural interaction,
videotaped and transcribed with children of about two years and a half – about their
altruistic helping behavior. How these behaviors are composed and where in a sequence
of actions they are positioned is described in detail. Pictures from the videos illustrate
what is observed and described. Children move from onlooker to helper. In the day care
settings adults are seen by the children as those whose first obligation it is to soothe,
console and comfort a crying child, but “as a matter pertaining to the culture at large, it
seems that even children this young search for someone to help…” (p. 531).

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Another contribution by Anssi Peräkylä leads the analyst even closer to the consulting
room. “Talking is indeed the key activity in all psychotherapies” (p. 551), this author
begins with, and one wonders why this inescapable insight is so rarely taken as a stimulus
for more research on psychoanalytic conversation. Anna O. had termed psychoanalysis a
“talking cure”, Freud echoed that not more happens in psychoanalysis than an “exchange
of words”. The analysis of conversation in the consulting room(s) should become an
object of heightened interest in psychoanalytic process research. Peräkylä studies
psychoanalytic talk. This talk is marked by “an endemic orientation in the therapist, and
usually in the patient, to examine the patient’s talk beyond its intended meaning” (p.
552). How this “beyond” is handled in conversation might be a topic of interest. It seems
to be a common conviction, shared by both participants; and Peräkylä shows how this
conviction is “translated” in conversational practice: by formulations, interpretations and
responses, using epistemic markers and perspective markers: “Thus, in delivering an
interpretation while speaking about the patient’s mind and circumstance, the therapist still
uses his or her own ‘voice’ in full strength” (p. 558). Peräkylä’s data are transcriptions of
psychoanalytic sessions which cannot be reproduced here. Patients respond to
interpretations with elaborations and show their (dis-)agreement. This is a crucial
difference to hearing a medical diagnosis; here patients usually remain silent.
“Resistance” and “affiliation” are further topics of CA analysis Peräkylä presents. He
concludes that psychotherapy might be a practice “far less uniform than the medical
consultation is”. This is as important as his next hint that CA should turn to clinically
relevant issues. The more general point is the methodologically difficult description and
definition of “deviant” conversations. Antaki and Wilkinson contribute to this with a
summary of relevant research of conversation of “atypical populations”. At any rate,
there is a growing hunch and evidence that there are links between cognition,
conversation and culture and that the different strands of research can be brought to
fruitful conversations.

Part V sees “CA across the Disciplines”. CA has roots in sociology and in linguistics, its
rich influences touch psychology and anthropology and “standard” communication
research. All these lines, seen from CA as the core methodological endeavor, are covered
with important contributions by authors specialized in these areas. If psychoanalysis and
CA could find a balanced way of cooperation, the one could enrich the other with deep
insights that might form a balanced counterweight to the momentary psychoanalytic
interest in neurosciences only. Psychoanalysts might remember how social our discipline,
how culturally determined psychoanalysis, how linguistic and conversational our
everyday tool – talk - is.

The same impression is furthermore strengthened when one turns to the book “Emotion
in Interaction“, edited by Peräkylä and Sorjonen. Emotion – this is what most
psychotherapists of whichever orientation think to be “their” genuine field. But, in
academia there is no sole proprietor of anything. “Emotions” belong to the opera and its
enthusiasts, to the scholars of literature, to family members, to the spin doctors of
political communication and, of course, to scientists of different proveniences. And to
psychoanalysts, of course. If one wants to know in what special way emotion is treated in
psychoanalysis, one has to study how emotion is treated in other fields of knowledge.
Otherwise, you cannot compare. Within CA approaches there are a lot of perspectives.

Marjorie Goodwin, Asta Cekaite and Charles Goodwin cover “emotional stance” using as
an example how emotions are conveyed in refusals as a special kind of social action.

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Although all authors refer to “basic emotions” and their expressions, still at the same time
all authors also find that emotion per se is a kind of abstraction that cannot be found in
the empirical world; emotions belong to particular social actions such as refusals,
requests (as Wootton shows in a transcription of interaction with a very young child),
directives, story-telling (contributions by Maynard and Freese) and complaints (Couper-
Kuhlen). Emotions are constitutive parts of how actions are performed and perceived.
Modern societies have implanted a lot of institutional mechanisms of emotion regulation
and emotion control, of which psychotherapy (Voutilainen) is a part as well as health
visiting (Heritage and Lindström). As in the “Handbook”, the question of how to
transcribe emotion utterances becomes an entire subject of study. Markku Haakana uses a
re-transcription by Gail Jefferson to show how it has become possible to transcribe the
entire features of “fake” laughter. Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter approach the same
methodological issue in their contribution on “Crying and Crying Responses”.

So, emotions are not only “basic”, produced with evolutionary progress. They are not
only perceived and interpreted and attributed by listeners, participants, viewers and
bystanders. They also have action tendencies and cognitive aspects without which we
would not be able to appraise many actions and human “objects”. Wootton analyzed the
expectations of a child between two and three years who produced strong emotions when
the parents did not fulfill the child’s expectations – which had been met just a second
before. Appraisals and their breaks are prone to producing emotions - this conclusion
must be drawn. Emotions do not only come bottom-up from the depths (of the brain),
sometimes they come top-down. CA methodology will have to have a debate on how to
include cognition. This includes unconscious cognitions, too. “To a large extent processes
related to emotions are automated and nonconscious” (p. 282), psychoanalyst and
conversation analyst Peräkylä summarizes in his very knowledgeable epilogue.

Emotions are a multifaceted object of interest. They should not be considered as

producers of interaction. It might be more correct to reverse the order of causation: social
interaction is the medium with the power to evoke and regulate human emotions. This, of
course, is the topic where so much of psychoanalytic research can come in – on
borderline patients, on the early developments of patients with psychotraumatic stress
disorders, on neglected children, on the cognitive abilities of autistic children. And the
net can be cast even further to include mirror neuron research, to the body as an important
actor in conversational scenarios, research on the difference between inner experience
and outer, social expression.

One thing remains to be mentioned. In a contribution to the “Handbook” John Heritage

writes about epistemics that drive sequences. Meant here is not only the wish to know, it
is the wish to balance knowledge so that participants in a local interaction share a
common level of situated relevance. Those who ask who Peter is in a story told, are
informed by the teller of the story: “he’s my brother-in-law” and the balance of
knowledge is repaired. One can assume that there lies a lot of potential to analyze how
emotions are produced in this conception: if this need for sharing knowledge, for the
balance of influence and participation is hurt, emotion is produced. This happens in child
rearing, in political discourse, in social practices in every second in the world. The link
between emotion, cognition and conversational practices, thus, can be seen as a common
orientation of research for the future in cooperation between psychoanalysis and CA. Our
societies as a whole will profit from this.

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Both books present in an excellent manner the state of the art, in CA in general and in
CA-emotion research. They harbour the power for a mutual fruitful exchange with
psychoanalytic knowledge and clinical experience. Psychoanalysis will have to adapt to
the standards of data generation and presentation as usually practiced in CA. Transcripts,
not protocols, are state of the art in data presentation and this should be acceptable by a
profession that is urged to present its empirical approach. Empirical research is more than
statistics and questionnaires, it is conversation that psychoanalysts engage in every day.
Here we have a method that is taken seriously worldwide to analyze this talk in
interaction in a precise and insightful way. And in many details this method comes close
to clinical experience.

On the other hand, psychoanalysts might seriously contribute to the meanings of some
kinds of exchanges presented in the details of such data. A very tricky matter in the future
will be whether the general CA-premise of “order in every point” (Garfinkel 1967) is
valid at every point? How can borderline-talk be made orderly? If it can, there must be
meaning in it, detectable according to clinical convictions only if conversation analysts
come to include an (auto-)biographical dimension as a useable methodological tool. The
category of meaning-making through conversation can be expanded with psychoanalytic
expertise. These books should enrich a stimulating debate between those two so
important fields.

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 References
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Heritage, J. (1999). Conversation analysis at century's end: Practices of talk-in-
interaction, their distributions, and their outcomes. Research on Language & Social
Interaction, 32, 69–76.
McCabe, R., Leudar, I., Healey, P. G. T (2006). What do you think I think? Theory of
Mind and schizophrenia. Proceedings of XXVII Annual Conference of the Cognitive
Science Society, 1443–1448.
Schegloff, E. A. (1999). What next?: Language and social Interaction study at the
Century's Turn. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 32, 141–148.
Tuckett, D. (1993). Some thoughts on the presentation and discussion of the clinical
material of psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74, 1175–
1189.
Tuckett, D. (2012). Some reflections on psychoanalytic technique: In need of core
concepts or an archaic Ritual? Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 32, 87–108.

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