Discourses of Counselling

In this book, David Silverman offers a fully researched and analytically sensitive account of how counselling, as a process, is dynamically constructed through the interaction of counsellor and client. Drawing on research on counselling of clients undergoing an HIV test, the author explores the ways in which conversations between counsellors and clients reflect, embody and subtly alter assumptions about the purpose, method and practice of counselling.

This critical appreciation of the modes of engagement between counsellor and client will be of interest to researchers and students of counselling, psychotherapy and associated helping professions. Practitioners - particularly those involved in HIV and other health counselling - will be stimulated to reflect on and respond to Silverman's analysis in their own practice. The book will also be essential reading for researchers and students in the traditions of sociological work on interactionism, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, applying these approaches in a sophisticated manner to the interactionist and conversational strategies adopted in a health promotion environment.