Narrative Therapy Notes

(Its Spring Break--classes are out and students are gone so it looks like I might get some work done. I'm looking into the "narrative therapy" movement for their recognition of how stories help us to shape, and make meaning of, our world.)

Erickson, M.H. “The Use of Systems as an Integral Part of Hypnotherapy.” (1965) The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis. V. 4 NY: Irvington, 1980: 212-223.

The therapist’s task should not be a proselytizing of the patient with his own beliefs and understandings. ... What is needed is the development of a therapeutic situation permitting the patient to use his own thinking, his own understandings, his own emotions in the way that best fits him in his scheme of life. (223)

Erickson, M.H. and E.L. Rossi. Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook. NY: Irvington, 1979

Each psychotherapeutic encounter is unique and requires fresh creative effort on the part of both the therapist and the patient to discover the principles and means of achieving a therapeutic outcome. (234)

Freedman, Jill and Gene Combs. Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities. NY: W.W. Norton and Co., 1996.

We liked the way Erickson attended to and respected the experience of the people he worked with. He cultivated a kind of therapeutic relationship that de-emphathized the therapist’s professional, theoretical ideas and put a benevolent spotlight on people’s particular situations. (Freedman/Combs: 10) {MB—They are talking about the therapist Milton H. Erickson—see your notes on him)

It invites our attention to rather small, rather tight, recursive feedback loops when, instead, we want to be paying more attention to ideas and practices at play in the larger cultural context. The “systems” metaphor tempts us to look within families for complementary circuits and for collaborative causation of problems, rather than to work with family members to identify the negative influence of certain values, institutions, and practices in the larger culture on their lives and relationships, and to invite them to pull together in opposing those values, institutions, and practices. It encourages a position of neutrality or curiosity rather than one of advocacy or passion for particular values and against others. (Freedman/Combs: 13) {MB—they state that feminist critiques in therapy led them to reassess their reliance on the systems metaphor (similar to humanist thought, rather than neo-marxist system theory) and their later move past Erickson hypnotherapy methods}

In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (White & Epston, 1990), White reminds us how Bateson used the metaphor of “maps,” saying that all our knowledge of the world is carried in the form of various mental maps of “external” or “objective” reality, and that different maps lead to different interpretations of “reality.” No map includes every detail of the territory that it represents, and events that don’t make it onto a map don’t exist in that map’s world of meaning. (Freedman/Combs: 15) {MB—see citation for the referenced book, page 2)

… {MB—social constructionism’s} main premise is that the beliefs, values, institutions, customs, labels, laws, divisions of labor, and the like that make up our social realities are constructed by the members of a culture as they interact with one another from generation to generation and day to day. That is, societies construct the “lenses” through which their members interpret the world. The realities that each of us take for granted are the realities that our societies have surround us with since birth. These realities provide the beliefs, practices, words, and experiences from which we make up our lives, or, as we would say in postmodernist jargon, “constitute our selves.”
When we use both narrative and social constructionism as guiding metaphors for our work, we see how the stories that circulate in society constitute our lives and those of the people we work with. We also notice how the stories of individual lives can influence the constitution of whole cultures—not just the stories of people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, but also those of people like Pocahontas, Annie Oakley, Helen Keller, and Tina Turner, as well as the stories of ordinary people whose name we have never heard. As we work with the people who come to see us, we think about the interaction between the stories that they are living out in their personal lives and the stories that are circulating in their cultures—both their local culture and the larger culture. We think about how cultural stories are influencing the way they interpret their daily experience and how their daily actions are influencing the stories that circulate in society. (Freedman/Combs: 16-17) {MB—see Weingarten: 289}

This conception of self is at odds with the skin-bound container with fixed contents (resources) that we had previously conceptualized. As we pondered the implications of this new “constitutionalist” metaphor of self, my (JF) taken-for-granted reality was so shaken up that I became motion-sick. I literally became nauseated. … If we were really to adapt these new ways of thinking and perceiving—which we wanted to do because of the kinds of therapy they support—we would become responsible for continually constituting ourselves as the people we wanted to be. We would have to examine taken-for-granted stories in our local culture, the contexts we moved in, the relationships we cultivated, and the like, so as to continually re-author and update our own stories. Morality and ethics would not be fixed things, but ongoing activities, requiring continuing maintenance and attention. (Freedman/Combs: 17)

Instead of seeing ourselves as mechanics who are working fix a broken machine or ecologists who are trying to understand and influence complex ecosystems, we experience ourselves as interested people—perhaps with an anthropological or biographical or journalistic bent—who are skilled at asking questions to bring forth the knowledge and experience that is carried in the stories of the people we work with. We think of ourselves as members of a subculture in collaborative interaction with other people to construct new realities. We now work to help people notice the influence of restrictive cultural stories in their lives and to expand and enrich their own life narratives. We strive to find ways to spread the news of individual triumphs—to circulate individual success stories so that they can keep our culture growing and flowing satisfying ways. (Freedman/Combs: 18)

What is important here … is that change, whether it be change of belief, relationship, feeling, or self-concept, involves a change in language. … Meanings are always somewhat indeterminate, and therefore mutable. … Meaning is not carried in a word by itself, but by the word in relation to its context, and no two contexts will be exactly the same. Thus the precise meaning of any word is always somewhat indeterminate, and potentially different; it is always something to be negotiated between two or more speakers or between a text and a reader. (Freedman/Combs: 29)

Rosenblatt, Paul. Metaphors of Family Systems. NY: Guilford Press, 1993.

{MB--Start a file of books that dissemble metaphoric constructions—exs. Lakoff, Morgan, Boje, Rigney…}

Weingarten, Kathy. “The Discourse of Intimacy: Adding a Social Constructionist and Feminist View.” Family Process 30 (1991): 285-305.

In the social constructionist view, the experience of self exists in the ongoing interchange with others … the self continually creates itself through narratives that include other people {MB—and other people’s narratives?} who are reciprocally woven into these narratives. (Weingarten: 289)

White, Michael. Re-Authoring Lives. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications, 1995.

Is this work better defined as a world-view? Perhaps, but even that is not enough. Perhaps it’s an epistemology, a philosophy, a personal commitment, a politics, an ethics, a practice, a life, and so on. (White: 37)

White, Michael and David Epston. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. NY: Norton, 1990.

In arguing that all information is necessarily “news of difference,” and that it is the perception of difference that triggers all new responses in living systems, he demonstrated how the mapping of events through time is essential for the perception of difference, for the detection of change. (White & Epston: 2) {MB—Freedman and Combs, following this quote, state that: “An advantage that Michael White saw in the narrative metaphor was that a story is a map that extends through time” (2).}