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This essay seeks to consider the theoretical work of Harlene Anderson and Harold Goolishian from the standpoint of existential and semiotic phenomenology-what Richard Lanigan (1992) has come to call, in his most recent work, "communicology." The essay then suggests another set of possibilities for the Collaborative Language System concept of therapeutic dialogue, one which might have additional productive implications for the future of this approach and which might help therapists better understand the semiotic conditions that accompany a client into the context of a professional therapeutic situation.
THE ANDERSON AND GOOLISHIAN APPROACH TO THE LANGUAGE OF THERAPY
A cursory glance at the bibliography of Harlene Anderson's text, Conversation, Language, and Possibilities (1997) reveals the extent to which her work is grounded in theories of language that endeavor to see beyond mere empiricism, objectivism, and functionalism. The approach that Anderson and her colleague Harry Goolishian began developing close to two decades ago emerged from their considerable background in family systems theory as a decidedly post-positivist and antifoundationalist perspective on the delicate relationship that takes shape between a trained clinician and a nervous client. As with virtually all of the current postmodern approaches to psychotherapeutic interaction, the approach developed by Goolishian and Anderson is concerned with the dynamics of power, the contingency of identity, and the invisible and insidious workings of discourse. Unlike other postmodern approaches to therapeutic interaction, the Collaborative Language Systems Approach is much more directly concerned with the therapeutic situation itself, as constituted by the clinician and client as dialogic partners, and is much more fully focused intellectually on the subtle yet critical province of language that constitutes the matrix of understanding between the two of them.
Although the thinking of Anderson and Goolishian is quite integrative and eclectic, if labels were to be given to what I take to be the most prominent intellectual schools of thought that have come to influence the Collaborative Language Systems Approach through its development, it would have to be the recent interpretive metatheories of German philosophical hermeneutics and French poststructuralism. Through both of these perspectives, the client is perceived as an author and storyteller whose vital, unique, and compelling point of view has yet to be sufficiently attended to by any of the mainstream listeners in...