Psychotherapy as a ‘‘structured immediacy’’ Ivan Leudar a, * , Wes Sharrock b , Jacqueline Hayes a , Shirley Truckle c a School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK b School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK c Birmingham Trust for Psychoanalytical Psychotherapy, Queens College, Somerset Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2QH, UK Received 11 July 2007; received in revised form 11 September 2007; accepted 25 September 2007 Abstract We discuss ways of including circumstances systematically in the analysis of social interactions, providing an example of how psychoanalytic child psychotherapists establish the occasion of group therapy. We use the work of Austin (1961, 1962) and Anscombe (1957) to take on board the fact that social interactions happen in ‘‘the here-and-now’’ and yet are also situated in participants’ lives and social arrangements at large. # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Psychoanalysis; Psychotherapy; Ethnomethodology; Circumstances; Austin; Anscombe 1. Introduction The fact that language is irreducibly indexical was of great importance for emerging ethnomethodology, so much so that Garfinkel initially defined it as an examination of the rational properties of indexical expressions (Garfinkle, 1967:11). Since its inauguration, however, ethnomethodology has paid relatively little, and certainly no systematic, attention to language and the forms that its indexicality takes. We consider one way in which linguistic form avails sensitivity to context, which is through action identification, or, more plainly, the matter of saying what people are doing. We draw upon two prominent sources in ‘ordinary language philosophy’, John Austin and Elizabeth Anscombe. Austin sought to show how the identification of the actions done in and by ‘saying things’ is connected to circumstances. Anscombe’s notion of identifying actions ‘under a www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 40 (2008) 863–885 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 161 275 2563. E-mail address: ivan.leudar@manchester.ac.uk (I. Leudar). 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.09.008