Therapeutic Communication

A review of the anthropological literature motivates an expansive definition of the therapeutic as practices that have or are purported to have salubrious effects on at least one of the parties involved. Those effects could be on the psychic or spiritual state of participants (i.e., what one is or has), on how they make sense of their state or circumstances (i.e., how one sees, feels, understands, or knows), and/or on their behavior (i.e., what one does and says, how, and to what effect). The idea that the therapeutic is invariably a matter of communicative practice is a premise of this review, which addresses ( a ) the diversity and distinctiveness of therapies as multimodal genres; ( b ) the therapeutic distillation of cultural values, projects, and ideals; ( c ) the epistemic and interpretive challenges of therapeutic communication, particularly relative to politically loaded questions of mediation; and ( d ) the scaling of the therapeutic as a kind of communication by way of communication.