Dear Michael,

there is a very fine grained methodology for analysing interaction, the constitution of meaning and interactional roles (in German 'Bedeutungs-, Rollen- und Handlungskonstitution') which is widely used in discursive psychology. It is called Conversation Analysis or Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (or more vaguely 'Gesprächsanalyse' in German) and has produced a vast amount of literature on therapeutic talk. You might check the website http://emcawiki.net/EMCA_bibliography_database#Specialised_EMCA_bibliographies for entries on that.  The beauty of this methodology is that it uses insights about how people make sense to each other (on a moment to moment basis) as an analytic tool to look at recorded and transcribed strips of actually occuring talk, and reconstruct what is happening there, like in counselling, medical or therapeutic situations.

Dear Emo, many thanks for this hint to CA. I am somewhat well informed about Conversation Analysis, however, I could not find up to now, if there is anywhere a transcription of a now moment or a moment-of-meeting. I am interested to find out if these moments can be detected by CA - or not.

Many thanks for responding to my question.

Michael

Dear Michael, basically - from what I understand after a quick look at Daniel Stern et.al. 1998 - I think that what they refer to as "now moments" or "moments-of-meeting" should be observable quite well by means of 'Gesprächsanalyse'. Not so much CA, because it is much more restricted to formal aspects of interaction, and has no such elaborated concept of the interactional constitution of relations ('Beziehungskonstitution'). Your problem will be rather to translate the concept in terms of how you can tell if something like this ("a sudden change in the implicit relational knowing") is or has been taking place. For instance: you could find a co-construction, where the patient finishes a sentence for the therapeut correctly, thereby demonstrating that he is able to 'read his/her mind', and this might be a new situation for both. But it takes you a close look at the ongoing activity to identify it, because co-constructions might also be used for other purposes (see Gotsbachner, Mroczynski, Ziem 2015). So it might be quite a task for you to find exemplars of "moments-of-meeting" in recorded and transcribed talk. Seems worth the effort.

Emo

http://www.univie.ac.at/frame-project/pdf/KollaborativeKonstruktionen.pdf

Dear Emo, many thanks for looking things up. Obviously you couldn't find a transcribed example of "moments" as well as I could not. However, your hints to co-constructions is very valuable for me. I have used the papers be Hutchins/Nomura

Hutchins, E., & Nomura, S. (2011). Collaborative Construction of Multimodal Utterances. In J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, & C. D. LeBaron (Eds.), Learning in doing : social, cognitive and computational perspectives. Embodied interaction. Language and body in the material world (pp. 29–43). New York: Cambridge University Press.

and

the work of Gene Lerner

Lerner, G. H. (2013). On the place of hesitating in delicate formulations: a turn-constructional infrastructure for collaborative indiscretion. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond, & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Studies in interactional sociolinguistics: Vol. 30. Conversational repair and human understanding. (pp. 95–134). Cambridge, UK, New York: Cambridge University Press.

who uses the term "other completion" for the phenomenon you described.

Thanks for your paper which is rich and exiting for me! I attach one of my recent works and here is a link on my work on "musical empathy"

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00349/abstract

Best

Michael