Psychotherapy as a “structured immediacy”

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.