Abstract This paper investigates practices of person-deictic shifts–a phenomenon traditionally associated with the narrative construction of reported talk. In contrast to previous studies that focus on reported talk of Self and Others, I examine how speakers animate the addressee’s thoughts and feelings in co-present interaction. In what I term origo inversion , the speaker deploys the first-person singular pronoun not to refer to themselves ( ego ), but to shift deictically to the addressee ( alter ) in the shared here-and-now and animate their ego -perspective. The analysis draws on video recordings of 25 sessions of a psychodynamic therapy with a depressed client. In the sequences under investigation, the therapist deictically adopts the client’s first-person perspective and animates, based on the client’s telling, their problem-related thoughts and feelings. The findings show that animations of the addressee’s ego -perspective are an interactionally delicate practice. They invert the participant roles of speaker and addressee, or ego and alter , impinging on the addressee’s epistemic rights and face concerns, and thus rarely occur in everyday talk. In psychotherapy, by contrast, this practice is (partially) licensed by the institutional role and task of the therapist, though not without interactional risks. On the one hand, the (non-canonical) therapeutic practice of animating the client’s feelings and thoughts provides an interactional resource for demonstrating understanding, affiliation, and empathy through perspective-taking. On the other hand, it risks encroaching on the client’s personal territory and eliciting resistance. Notably, clients‘ reactions also depend on the extent to which their own view of their inner experiences is transformed by the therapist’s rendering. Accordingly, client responses range from explicit affirmation, elaboration, and self-animation to dispreference marking, silence, and overt rejection.
Anja Stukenbrock (Tue,) studied this question.