'This adventurous book, on the border between psychotherapy and social science, brings into relief the amazing complexity and exquisite sophistication of conversation. Since talk is the common currency of most psychotherapies, Jean Pain's insights into the subtle meanings and powerful impact of even the most apparently trivial utterances should strike a chord with any practitioner. The great contribution this book makes is to bring to bear on psychotherapy the accumulated insights of Conversational Analysis, whose achievements in taking conversation apart - and putting it back together again - Jean Pain so sensitively and enthusiastically champions. This book is a must for any student of psychotherapy who has ever asked themselves: how do therapist and client actually talk to each other?'- Charles Antaki, Professor of Language and Social Psychology, Loughborough University'Jean Pain has a passion for creating a better psychotherapy and her work on conversational analysis looks like holding some of the clues as to how to achieve this. Drawing from her own immersion in Jungian, NLP and other therapies, and in a tradition of understanding the micro-features of therapeutic communication, Pain joins the therapist-researchers like Rogers, Bugental, Hobson, Wachtel and Casement. Challenging some of the too readily taken-for-granted aspects of our training and practice, she looks again at therapist self-disclosure and closed questions, and analyses closely the nature of 'troubles-telling'. This book focuses anew on the heart of the therapeutic meeting, offers an integrative way forward for the profession and deserves to find its way into training reading lists.'- Colin Feltham, Professor of Critical Counselling Studies, Sheffield Hallam University
