Alfred Schutz: The Co-Construction of meaning within professional-patient interaction

The point of departure for this chapter, as with Schutz’s social theory itself, is the work of Max Weber. It is Weber’s understanding of social action, hinging around aspects of subjective meaning, that Schutz has so usefully scrutinised and developed. The first half of the chapter considers key tenets of Schutz’s positive critique of Weber, which draws heavily on his critical reading of Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy. In his characteristically thorough and specified manner, Schutz denoted various difficulties in Weber’s conceptualising of how we make sense of others and how we consider their motives. Within these different reflections upon social action, Schutz stresses the incompleteness of our understanding of others and our heavy reliance on ‘taken-for-granted’ knowledge that actors accumulate over time. The problems of communication that emerge also prompt us to consider the different forms of knowledge we develop about others and the world around us. Concepts of ideal-types, the natural attitude and the life-world are seen as vital to this analysis. Later sections discuss professional-patient interaction in light of this framework, emphasising the inherent limitations to mutual understanding that Schutz illuminates. Certain important applications of Schutzian frameworks for the analysis of clinical encounters are reviewed.