The Emotional Psychologist: A Critical Discursive Analysis of Psychologists’ Talk about Their Emotions within the Therapeutic Relationship

Abstract

While psychologists’ own emotional management is an integral part of psychological therapy, it is often assumed rather than discussed; the affective expectations for the profession are unarticulated. In this research I explore how psychologists talk about their patterns of emoting within the therapeutic relationship in order create an account of the profession’s expectations for emotional expression and to open up a space for a critical examination of these expectations. I understand emotion as affective practices which are both being constituted actively as people carry out the practice and shaped over time as past practice carves out grooves of emoting that become familiar and habitual (Wetherell, 2012). This understanding of emotions attends to both patterns, and points of tension or contestation. I asked practising psychologists about their emotional practices within the therapeutic relationship in four small focus groups and 11 follow up individual interviews. I use the variety of discourse analysis developed within critical social psychology (Billig, 1987; Edley, 2001; Wetherell, 1998) to examine how participants made meaning around their emotions within the therapeutic relationship by drawing on different affective-discursive repertoires. The analysis includes an account of how psychologists have come to construct their emotions in dilemmatic ways in the context of clinical psychology as a profession (which has gone through many iterations in the years since its inception in the first part of the 20th century), and well as a consideration of how participants spoke about trying to resolve these points of tension and dilemma. I also consider participants’ talk about when professional feelings go awry, how they work on themselves in order manage ‘unprofessional’ emotions, and the implications of these affective-discursive identity negotiations for their constructions of self. I suggest that that the exchange of certain emotions for remuneration within this profession becomes hidden within the individuals’ subjectivity. I consider some of the wider social power relations that both hold these practices in place and are reproduced as psychologists emote in prescribed ways. Finally I reflect on whether an affective practices understanding of emotions could be used as a rhetorical tool to help psychologists look more critically at the functions of their emotions within the therapeutic relationship.