Pragmatics 8:2.149-154. International Pragmatics Association

CLINICAL INTERVIEWS AS VERBAL INTERACTIONS: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY OUTLOOK INTRODUCTION1
Michèle Grossen and Anne Salazar Orvig

Interviewing is a widespread social practice which many practitioners or institutional representatives (therapists, social workers, researchers, etc.) carry out in their daily professional routines. In various institutional settings, clinical interviews are the most common devices institutional representatives use to establish a relationship with their clients and perform their roles. At a practical and descriptive level, clinical interviews can be defined as verbal interactions which aim at making a diagnosis (or more generally an assessment), a …ver más…

Some of them are or have also been practitioners in different therapeutic or educational settings. In other words, the authors' interests in clinical interviews have various origins: a desire to reflect upon present or past professional practice, a willingness to examine whether given theoretical and methodological models can be applied to clinical interviews, a strong interest in multidisciplinary collaboration, etc. On the basis of these common interests in clinical interviews as special types of social practices, the aim of this issue is to draw together a selection of articles written by researchers who bear witness to the various theoretical and methodological perspectives in which clinical interviews may be studied. The collected articles concern various clinical interviews: initial therapy sessions (Michèle Grossen and Denis Apothéloz; Nadine Proia; Anne Salazar Orvig), hypnotic therapy (Alain Trognon), speech therapy (Annie Chalivet and Marie-Madeleine de Gaulmyn), school referral meetings (Wilma Minoggio) and research interviews (Amina Bensalah). As regards the contribution by Lorenza Mondada, it offers a theoretical overview of research into therapy interviews, while Christian