The Possibility of Conversation

In the present article I am concerned with conversation as a way of participation. Hearing, speaking, and silence will cross and create the possibilities of the conversational space I explore. The question of participation opens the essay and leads to the notion of incision both between and within speakers. Speaking is depicted as basically cut by an unheard, repressed silence. The unsilencing of silence evokes a conversation conscious of itself in sadness and in laughter and a reopening of the door for creative speech. The shift of conversation toward its creative possibilities will be likened to a leap to a public square of speaking voices or a piazza of conversation. The article will traverse a certain critical path, mainly through Erving Goffman's idea of staged talk and Jacques Lacan's notion of split within the speaking subject.     

Distance and Conversation

Whenever faces are engaged in a face-to-face conversation distance is evoked between them as a “common dialogic space” that both connects and separates. This space must be dealt with in conversation. The habitual tendency is to cover it up by formulating a topic that is external to the immediate relation. Keeping the topic going “holds” the separate parties together in an ongoing engagement. When the topic for some reason fails to hold, the gap between the participants is exposed and they fall embarrassedly into silence. There are, however, ways to give presence to distance and still contain it within the bounds of the conversation. What this calls for is a recognition of the other as Other and of the speaking voice as an emergent self rather than an utterance subordinate to the external topic. A discussion of the phenomenon of distance from the perspectives of speaker and hearer is followed by an examination of its effects on the seriousness of the conversation.     

Conversation with Robert McGinley

Dr. Robert McGinley and his wife, Geri, have managed one of the nation's largest swing clubs for the past ten years. During the past several years Bob McGinley has become a social activist and public figure founding the Society for the Study of Alternative Lifestyles, the annual Lifestyles Conventions held on the West Coast, and the North American Swing Club Association. Bob and Geri have also appeared on a number of television programs, such as the Phil Donahue show. Bob has spoken about swinging in numerous university classrooms and on radio talk shows and writes about it in popular media. He has recently acquired a Ph.D. in psychology and does sexual dysfunction counseling.We are indebted to the following persons, who have served as ad hoc reviewers for the current volume: Victor A. Benassi, Barry Dank, Sharon Raphael, Ralph Hupka, Wayne Wooden, Robert Pickett, Vern Bullough.     

The Joint Action of Parents and Adolescents in Conversation About Career

Analyses of 14 videotaped parent—adolescent career conversations reveal the socially constructed nature of career. These analyses are used to identify joint actions in career conversations, determine their patterns, and address their meaning for the participants. Joint action refers to the action that people take together or that occurs between them. The participants used 3 superordinate joint actions (struggle, exploration, and negotiation) and several subordinate joint actions. Three patterns of joint actions were also identified. The joint actions had particular meaning for both career and the relationship between the participants.     

Conversation with Herbert S. Strean

Dr. Herbert Strean has been a most influential practitioner and educator in the advancement of clinical social work. Not only has he made an outstanding contribution to our professional literature, but has also been a major critic of our profession's movement away from its therapeutic obligation to clients. Since its inception, he has been on the editorial board of this journal and a regular contributor. After a distinguished career as a professor at Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work he has retired to direct the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training. We are fortunate to have the first interview with him after his retirement from Rutgers.     

Deviance,Rule-Breaking and Male Dominance in Conversation

Previous research on dyadic interaction indicates that cross-sex conversations (male-female) are characterized by more frequent interruptions than same-sex conversations. More specifically, males consistently tend to interrupt their female co-conversationalists. Survey data from three student samples suggest that normative definitions reflected in perceptions of interruption are inconsistent with the empirical distribution of rule-breaking observed by conversational researchers. These results provide some strategic insights into the problematic distinction between deviance and rule-breaking that has been central to labeling theory.     

Age Similarities in Interpersonal Perception and Conversation Ability

Older adults tend to perform worse on emotion perception tasks compared to younger adults. How this age difference relates to other interpersonal perception tasks and conversation ability remains an open question. In the present study, we assessed 32 younger and 30 older adults’ accuracy when perceiving (1) static facial expressions, (2) emotions, attitudes, and intentions from videos, (3) and interpersonal constructs (e.g., kinship). Participants’ conversation ability was rated by coders from a videotaped, dyadic problem-solving task. Younger adults were more accurate than older adults perceiving some but not all emotions. No age differences in accuracy were found on any perception task or in conversation ability. Some but not all of the interpersonal perception tasks were related. None of the perception tasks predicted conversation ability. Thus, although the literature suggests a robust age difference in emotion perception accuracy, this difference does not seem to transfer to other interpersonal perception tasks or interpersonal outcomes.     

The Discursive Performance of the Alliance in Family Therapy: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

Following the ‘discursive’ turn in family therapy, the attention of practitioners shifted towards understanding how culture and language shape meaning‐making in therapy. In this article, we demonstrate how conversation analysis (CA) can be used to examine the processes and outcomes of systemic/constructionist practice. We used CA to study collaborative interactions of a renowned constructionist therapist Karl Tomm and one client‐family. Viewing collaboration as a pivotal aspect of the therapeutic alliance, we demonstrate how the ‘split’ within‐system alliances were developed and sustained in the course of therapy and how they were discursively transformed into ‘intact’ alliances. The therapist's efforts to align with perspectives of family members (and subsystems) seemed pivotal in this process.     

Interviewing Ron Perry: Keeping the Conversation Going

Throughout his long career in counselling and family therapy, Ron Perry has seen enormous ups and downs in the field. He studied with, and worked alongside, family therapy masters such as Virginia Satir, Jay Haley, MRI and the Milan team and his dedication to counselling and psychotherapy culminated in an Order of Australia medal in 2005. In this conversation, Ron provides an intimate understanding of family therapy emphasising the value of teams and interventions that achieve good outcomes for families.     

The Extraction of Nonverbal Behaviors: Using Video Images and Speech-Signal Analysis in Dyadic Conversation

This study examined the validity and possible utility of a new procedure for the extraction of nonverbal behaviors from dyadic conversation. Three methods were used to extract nonverbal behaviors (i.e., hand gestures, adaptors, and utterances). A novel automated method employing video images and speech-signal analysis software programs was compared to the more traditional coding and behavioral rating methods. The automated and coding methods provided an objective count of how many times a target behavior occurred, while behavioral ratings were based on more subjective impressions. Although there was no difference between the automated and coding methods for hand gestures, the coding method using an event recorder yielded marginally significantly more instances of adaptors and utterances as compared to the software programs. Measures of each nonverbal behavior were positively correlated across the different methods. In addition, interpersonal impressions of each speaker were rated by both observers and conversational partners. Although R ² was lower than for the coding/behavioral rating methods, nonverbal behaviors extracted using the software programs significantly predicted familiarity and activeness ratings from both observer and partner points of view. These results support the validity and possible utility of the software-based automated extraction procedure.