A recurrent theme that is addressed in psychotherapies is the client’s conflicting emotions. This article discusses discursive practices of working on conflicting emotions during psychodynamic psychotherapy. We focus on a phenomenon that we refer to as a ‘delayed response’ and analyze the client’s uses of interactional means, such as a display of negative experience, to invite affiliation or empathy from the therapist. The therapist, however, does not take a turn in the first possible place after the client’s turn. Recurrently, the therapist’s silence is followed by the client’s new turn that backs down from the emotional experience under discussion. After these retractions, the therapists respond with a turn that is responsive both to the retraction and to the initial display of negative experience that occurred prior to it. We argue that the timing of the therapist’s response in these sequences is in the service of psychotherapeutic work on conflicting emotions.

心理治疗中反复出现的一个主题是来访者的矛盾情绪。本文讨论了在心理动力学心理治疗中处理冲突情绪的话语实践。我们专注于一种我们称之为“延迟反应”的现象，并分析来访者对互动方式的使用，例如负面体验的展示，以引起治疗师的归属感或同理心。然而，治疗师在轮到来访者之后并没有在第一个可能的位置上轮到。通常，治疗师的沉默之后是来访者的新转变，即从正在讨论的情感体验中退缩。在这些回缩之后，治疗师会做出一个转身来回应回缩和在回缩之前发生的负面体验的初始显示。