Open Access

Thomas Spranz-Fogasy, Susanne Kabatnik, Christoph Nikendei

• Psychotherapy talk is characterized by epistemic, emotional and professional asymmetries of knowledge, which are continuously adjusted to by the participants in joint process of negotiation. Adjustment is based on structural features of communication: the fundamental sequentiality of verbal interaction, i.e. interrelated succession of utterances of at least two interlocutors, provides for and guarantees the achievement of intersubjectivity and therapeutic efficiency. Solution-oriented questions as a rhetorical practice serve to produce forward-looking awareness, expansion of knowledge and reorganization of knowledge on the patient’s side as well as an increased ability to act. These processes become apparent not only locally in the immediate context of solution-oriented questions but also globally in the course of the interaction as a whole. The data for this research consists of psychodiagnostic interviews conducted according to the concept and manual of the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD Task Force 2009).