Schulz von Thun's The Art of Conversation: the political condition of the communication

Abstract

This article presents a brief critical analysis of Friedemann Schulz Von Thun’s text The Art of Conversation (1981), which explores the topic of interpersonal communication from a psychological-interventionist perspective. Through hermeneutical exercise bereft of pretensions of arriving at any absolute affirmations, it reviews the key postulates of von Thun’s model and the elements that, according to the authors, make it possible to comprehend the political condition it entails in light of the involvement, and reactivation, of the ambit of power relations in verbal interactions, and the persuasive establishment of psycho-communicative patterns of normalization. In this sense, the communication model analyzed evolves into a device that, with no explicit intention of doing so –and perhaps without its author even being aware of it– generates prescriptions for verbal behavior directed towards the functioning of social relations and their acritical harmonization in an intrinsically-political exercise of psychologization.