Abstract: In this talk, I argue that language is not only a vehicle through which queer identities, political claims and hierarchies of value are publicly articulated but also a fundamental tool in psychotherapy. In therapeutic encounters, language is used to interpret experience, negotiate conflicting identifications, and recognise and revalue devalued aspects of the self. From this perspective, moving from public discourse to psychotherapy, I explore the communicative processes through which social meanings become personally and relationally consequential, and through which they may become available for therapeutic exploration and transformation.
In previous research, I have examined how sexuality intersects with Greek national belonging in public discourse, and how this intersection is locally constructed in talk-in-interaction, so that ‘Greek queerness’ may be contested, questioned, negotiated, and/or reclaimed through language (Katsiveli, 2021a, 2024). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and conversation analysis, I show how belonging is organised through category accounts, pronoun uses, and evaluative stance-taking. Such linguistic practices may reproduce the perceived incompatibility between queerness and Greekness, but they may also reconfigure it, by reframing internalised identity borders (Levon & Katsiveli, 2025) or attaching value to alternative queer person-types, and cultural symbols (Levon & Katsiveli, in press).
In this talk, I revisit these processes through the lens of psychotherapy, asking what happens when public categories and hierarchies of value become articulated as thrapeutic concerns. Drawing on Elias’s (1978) rejection of a strict division between the individual and society, group-analytic approaches to psychotherapy (Foulkes, 1975) treat socialisation and individuation as interdependent processes: people become distinctive selves through communicative relations, while also reproducing, reinterpreting and potentially transforming the social worlds they inhabit. The group-analytic concept of the social unconscious (Weinberg 2007), provides a complementary vocabulary for historically specific assumptions, affective associations, cultural memories and relations of value that remain consequential within individual experience, even when consciously rejected. Against this background, I approach psychotherapy as a field of sociolinguistic inquiry in which socially inherited meanings become personal, interactionally negotiated and potentially revalued. Therapist-client interaction, including questions, formulations, categories, metaphors and narratives, does not merely describe pre-existing queer selves; it participates in constructing what counts as distress, authenticity, autonomy, integration and desirable change. As previous research on apparently inclusive public interaction suggests, affirmative intentions do not necessarily prevent the reproduction of normativity (Katsiveli, 2021b). Through a closer examination of therapeutic discourse and clinical vignettes, I show how alternative formulations construct different problems, subject positions and possible futures.
I argue that sociolinguistic attention to psychotherapy is necessary both for identifying the assumptions that organise queer (dis)belonging and for understanding how therapeutic interventions may help bring conflicting aspects of the self into a more workable relationship. In this sense, the study of language reveals its role in the (re)production and contestation of power in the public sphere but, importantly, it also shows how language itself may become a therapeutic resource. “But we who?” thus becomes both a public and a therapeutic question: which voices, attachments and identifications are allowed to belong within a person’s account of who they are?
References
Elias, N. (1978). What is sociology? Hutchinson.
Foulkes, S. H. (1975). Group-analytic psychotherapy: Method and principles. Gordon and Breach.
Katsiveli, S. (2021a). Intersections of sexuality and Greek national belonging: A conversation analytic approach [Doctoral dissertation, Queen Mary University of London].
Katsiveli, S. (2021b). “It is this ignorance we have to fight”: Emergent gender normativities in an interview with Greek transgender activists. Gender and Language, 15(2), 158–183.
Katsiveli, S. (2024). If I want to join this queer thing, will they accept me? Queer identities and identities of queer in talk-in-interaction [In Greek]. In G. Tembridou (Ed.), Kouir. Psifides.
Levon, E., & Katsiveli, S. (2025). Borders, norms, and the dialogic construction of self. In Y. Bürki & A. N. García Agüero (Eds.), Language, borders and bordering practices: Sociolinguistic perspectives (pp. 305–338). Au Press.
Levon, E., & Katsiveli, S. (in press). Sexuality and the interactional micro-politics of belonging. In M. S. Karrebæk & M. Maegaard (Eds.), Language, nation, value. John Benjamins. Weinberg, H. (2007). So what is this social unconscious anyway? Group Analysis, 40(3), 307–322.
About the presenter
Stamatina Katsiveli (she/her) is a sociolinguist and group-analytic psychotherapist, who works as an Assistant Professor at The American College of Greece. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Queen Mary University of London. Her work examines language, gender/sexuality and belonging, as well as the dynamics of groups across educational, organizational and therapeutic settings, bringing group analysis into dialogue with sociolinguistics. Her research has appeared in Gender & Language, Journal of Pragmatics, and Anglistica AION. She has also served as a reviewer for Gender & Language and the Journal of Language and Discrimination.
