From Military Masculinity toward Hybrid Masculinities: Constructing a New Sense of Manhood among Veterans Treated for PTSS

This study examines how Israeli men who are army veterans with combat-related post-traumatic stress and consequently participated in therapy engage “new masculinities” ideologies. Drawing from interview data with these veterans, we find changes in the men’s perceptions of masculinity and sense of themselves as men. They expressed this shift through criticisms of military masculinity and disassociating from the idea of man-as-fighter, disputing the sociocultural category of hegemonic masculinity, and performing practices identified as feminine. The men portrayed this movement, away from endorsing hegemonic military masculinity toward affirming “new masculinity” ideology rooted in therapeutic discourse, which emphasizes sensitivity, emotional disclosure, self-care, and seeking help, as intertwined with their mental recovery—and they attributed both to therapy. These findings suggest that new masculinity ideology embedded in therapeutic discourse, can offer men suffering from PTSS a template to reaffirm their status as men—although men of a different kind—and indicate the possibilities for therapy in this endeavor. However, while the men adopted new masculinity ideologies, they also conformed to hegemonic masculinity, constructing hybrid masculinities. The study joins growing evidence that hybrid masculinities may have positive effects in enabling men to overcome the limitations of hegemonic masculinity, while also conforming to its expectations more broadly and maintaining men’s power.

Application of Intent-Analysis to Therapeutic Discourse in the Analysis of the Professional Activity of Psychotherapists

The paper presents the author's original technique of intent-analysis of psychotherapeutic discourse, alongside the results of the in-depth psychological intent-analysis of Carl Rogers’ psychotherapeutic speech, which was conducted using this technique. This paper includes a dictionary of therapeutic speech intentions, a classification of intentional characteristics of psychotherapeutic speech, some markers of intentions and an instruction for experts. The work includes an analysis of several therapeutic sessions given by Carl Rogers, as compared to those given by novice client-centered psychotherapists; the analysis was carried out using the author’s original methodology (intent-analysis of psychotherapeutic discourse). The developed tools can be significant and useful in the supervision of practicing psychotherapists and the training of novice psychotherapists.

Religious and Mizrahi Identities in Lehava and in Its Struggle to Maintain the Honor of the Jewish Family

Lehava is an extreme right-wing Israeli movement that attracts mostly traditional Mizrahi youth; its stated goal is to combat intermarriage. The article addresses the following questions: What attracts members to the organization? How does it operate? Where is it located within the Israeli ethno-national sphere? And where should it be positioned in a global comparative view? Research methods included participant observation, ethnographic interviews and a survey of social media. It was found that Lehava combines modes of activity typical of Israeli Haredi organizations devoted to combating intermarriage with those of extreme right-wing urban movements. Three dominant discourses were identified among supporters: a militant-nationalist discourse concerning Arab men, a therapeutic discourse used when referring to the members themselves and to the women they are seeking to “save,” and a religious discourse that supports the other two. Attitudes identified among religious Mizrahi Jews in Israel were found to be prominent in Lehava as well. It is also asserted that the organization’s resistance to intermarriage with Arabs can be explained as an attempt to preserve “family honor.” A comparative analysis underscored how the religious and therapeutic discourses, alongside the ethnic identity of members, differentiate Lehava from Western fascist movements and point to affinities with Eastern European and Muslim extremist organizations.

The politics of glocalised post-traumatic emotion worlds and the limits of Cambodian therapeutic subjectivity

This article traces the way in which a local Cambodian NGO disseminates psychological therapeutic discourse and practice in post-genocide Cambodia potentially laying the constitutive ground for a Cambodian therapeutic subject. Ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors allow for an examination of Cambodian perceptions of newly disseminated Euro-Western (EW) therapeutic practices and an evaluation of the potential friction between Buddhist Khmer ethnopsychological emotional styles and EW therapeutic emotional styles. Findings point to diverse mechanisms circulating therapeutic subjectivity including rural psychological pedagogy, testimony therapy and a hybrid local-global trauma construct – baksbat-trauma. Baksbat (broken courage)-trauma syncretises Cambodian ethnopsychological and EW psychological understandings of fear, emotional distress and healing. Ethnographic lay Cambodian accounts present cultural friction between the EW therapeutic model and the Cambodian Buddhist/ethnopsychological model. Tacit Cambodian emotional styles include Buddhist avoidance of and resistance to EW emotional working through of and therapeutic talk about past suffering and public memory work. Compared with EW trauma-related fear, the semantic fields of baksbat cannot be disentangled from political and economic structural violence perceived as the root cause of distress nor from Buddhist acceptance and avoidance as a pragmatic and adaptive response. Implications are considered regarding the politicising and depoliticising potential of therapeutic practice and the globalisation of therapeutic subjectivity.

First Encounters in Psychotherapy: Relationship-Building and the Pursuit of Institutional Goals

This article examines how therapists and patients start building and managing relationships and pursue institutional goals at the same time. Based on a corpus of 6 audio-recorded therapies (client-centered therapy and psychodynamic therapy), I investigate first encounters between therapists and patients as the starting points of any therapeutical process and the place where a relationship between the interactants is established for the first time. Following a microlinguistic qualitative approach and applying methods from conversation analysis and discourse analysis, I show how therapists, on the one hand, try to align with patients to build a positive working alliance and, on the other hand, work to fulfill specific interactive tasks of therapeutic discourse which demand disaligning with the patients’ communicative activity and their interactive expectations. Specific interactive “jobs” that need to be fulfilled in psychotherapy are identified, namely the performance of institutional roles by the interactants, the establishment of an interaction structure and the pursuit of helpful change in the patient. I show at which places in the interaction therapists (dis-)align with the patients’ projected communicative activity and how aligning and disaligning are related to the interactive process and the establishment and performance of these interactive jobs. The analysis shows that, at the beginning of therapy, alignment and disalignment are both important processes for the following reasons: Aligning with the patient contributes to a positive relationship, which has been shown to be vital for successful psychotherapy, while disaligning introduces the patient to the specific discursive mechanisms that characterize therapeutic discourse and constitute the basis for its effectiveness. Overall, the paper argues that reducing therapy to a dichotomy between relationship and “technique” seems overly simplistic, as both aspects need to be handled and managed at the same time.

A mixed-method analysis of image-schematic metaphors in describing anger, anxiety, and depression

The importance of metaphor in psychotherapy and counseling has been shown by a growing number of studies. Image-schematic metaphors, which derive from experience of sensory processes and space, are potential resources for conceptualizing major themes like anger, anxiety, and depression in therapeutic discourse. To test the potential correlation between image-schematic metaphors and the themes of anger, anxiety, and depression, this study employs a mixed-method approach, integrating corpus linguistics techniques, discourse analysis, and statistical analysis, to examine a specialized corpus of therapeutic transcripts which contains approximately three million words. The findings show that containment, force, path, and vertical orientation are the most frequent types of image-schematic metaphors for describing the therapeutic themes of anger, anxiety, and depression in the corpus, and there is a significant correlation between the two variables (i.e., “types” and “themes”). This study has implications for how image-schematic metaphors can be used to facilitate the descriptions of anger, anxiety, and depression in therapeutic conversations.

The Treatment of Doubt

This chapter follows Jews whose life-changing doubt was discovered by or confessed to a spouse. It talks about therapeutic professionals who tried to help double lifers such as Jewish life coaches, outreach rabbis, and religious therapists. It also explains the profession of religious therapy that are in the midst of a moral struggle as to which authorities they owed their allegiance: their own religious orthodoxy or their clients' individual autonomy. The chapter explains how most therapeutic professionals rejected the common rabbinic explanation in circulation for the contemporary crisis of faith, the Internet. It also points out how therapeutic professionals drew on the authority of therapeutic discourse in order to argue that it was emotional and interpersonal dynamics that obstructed emuna or faith.

AN ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE FUNCTION OF INDONESIAN THERAPEUTIC DISCOURSE: CUPPING THERAPY

The conversation in therapeutic is a kind of institutional discourse that have its own characteristic to make the communication. This research aims to find the language function in the Cupping conversation between the therapist and the patient. This research uses descriptive method. The data of this research are the the transcriptions of recorded conversation between the therapist and the patient. The sources of this data are the conversation from five therapist and each therapist have four patients. Hence, there are 20 conversation recorded in this research. The records of their conversations are transcribed as the data. The theory that used in this research is Leech (1974) to show language functions of the conversation. The result of this research shows that the conversation between the Cupping therapists and the patients have the tendency to used several forms of language functions. It is found that almost all conversations contained the informative language, directive language, and phatic language.

Between medicine and rhetoric: therapeutic arguments in Roman Stoicism

In this paper, I intend to focus on some rhetorical strategies of argumentation which play crucial role in the therapeutic discourse of Roman Stoicism, namely in Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Reference is made to Chaim Perelman’s view of ancient rhetoric as an art of inventing arguments. Moreover, it is pointed out that in rhetorical education (cf. Cicero, Ad Herennium, Quintilian, etc.) as well as in therapeutic discourse the concept of “exercise” and constant practice play a crucial role.

Wayward Elites: From Social Reproduction to Social Restoration in a Therapeutic Boarding School

In the past few decades, a multi-billion-dollar “therapeutic boarding school” industry has emerged largely for America’s troubled upper-class youth. This article examines the experiences of privileged youth in a therapeutic boarding school to advance social restoration as a new form of social reproduction. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork inside a Western therapeutic boarding school for young men struggling with substance abuse, I explore how students leverage a stigmatized, addict identity in ways that can restore privilege. Findings suggest that students engage in social restoration by constructing an overarching restorative narrative that works through three mechanisms: (1) experiential reframing, (2) appropriated therapeutic discourse, and (3) boundary maintenance through “othering.” Using these narrative strategies, students are able to transform a stigma into a symbolic marker of character that they use to reclaim privileged positions and dominant roles. This process of social restoration illuminates previously unexamined issues at the intersections of power and privilege, stigma, and inequality.