28.11 Narrative Psychotherapy
893
logic to argue that people understand themselves in the same
way they understand characters.
Narrative approaches to identity allow people to navigate
the tension between essentialist and nonessentialist identities
because narrative identity allows for a kind of continuity over
time, a relative stability of self, without implying a substantial
or essentialist core to this stability. People’s interpretations of
themselves use the cultural stories with which they are sur-
rounded to tell a story of self that escapes the two poles of
random change and absolute identity. In this way, a narrative
identity is also a cultural identification. A person’s identifica-
tion may seem original, but he or she narrates them with the
resources of history, language, and culture.
Narrative Psychotherapy
With this brief introduction into narrative medicine, narrative
psychotherapy, and narrative theory, it is possible to draw out
further the meaning of narrative for psychiatry.
Fortunately, one of the most helpful aspects of narrative
theory for psychiatry is that it provides an overarching, or
metatheoretical, rationale for understanding how these many
psychotherapies work. From a narrative perspective, all thera-
pies involve a process of story telling and story retelling. No
matter which style of psychotherapy one uses, the process of
therapy involves an initial presentation of problems that the
client is unable resolve. The client and therapist work together
to bring additional perspectives to these problems, allowing
the client to understand them in a new way. These additional
perspectives vary greatly depending on which style of psycho-
therapy is used. It matters, in other words, whether the therapy
is psychodynamic, cognitive, humanistic, feminist, spiritual, or
expressive. From the vantage point of narrative theory, however,
what these different approaches all have in common is that they
rework, or “re-author,” the patient’s initial story into a new story.
This new story allows new degrees of flexibility for understand-
ing the past and provides new strategies for moving into the
future.
Future Directions
Recent work in narrative medicine, narrative psychotherapy,
and narrative theory has opened the door for the development of
narrative psychiatry. This development provides a critical cor-
rective to contemporary psychiatric practice that helps to bring
psychiatry back from its current obsessions with science and
scientific method. This corrective is not a return to psychoanaly-
sis nor does it demolish the progress of scientific psychiatry.
When psychiatrists take a narrative turn, they do not throw out
their other skills and knowledge. The shift to narrative is, as
much as anything else, an attitude shift and an opening out to
additional sources of information. It starts by bringing to the
foreground that the clinical encounter is a human encounter, and
it follows by opening out to colleagues in the humanities, inter-
pretive social sciences, and the arts to help to better understand
this human encounter.
Most of all, narrative psychotherapy joins with other contem-
porary efforts in psychiatry—such as the recovery movement—
to make clinical encounters much more client focused and col-
laborative. Narrative psychotherapy, at its core, recognizes that
there are many ways to tell the story of one’s life. The choice
among these different options is a key way in which people cre-
ate their identity. These choices should not be reduced to expert
choices or scientific choices because they are always also per-
sonal and ethical choices. In the end, they are choices about
what kind of life one wants to live.
Furthermore, clinicians must come to understand the value
of biography, autobiography, and literature for developing a
repertoire of narrative frames and options. In the end, narra-
tive competency in psychiatry means a tremendous familiarity
with the many possible stories of psychic pain and psychic dif-
ference. The more stories clinicians know, the more likely they
are to help their clients to find a narrative frame that works
for them.
For patients and potential service users, a narrative under-
standing means that there is a range of possible therapists and
healing solutions that might be helpful. An approach that is right
for one person may not be right for another. There must be a fit
between the person and the approach, and people should feel
empowered to take seriously their intuitions and feelings. If
the person getting help does not feel this fit, he or she is likely
right. There may well be another approach that would work bet-
ter with the person’s proclivities. Like everything else, however,
judgment is critical. Therapeutic experiences of all kinds can
be frustrating, slow, and uncertain. How, for example, does one
know when an approach misses his or her needs and when it
is something that will take time, patience, and perseverance to
be helpful? From a narrative perspective, there can be no gold
standard or simple answers. Only judgment, wisdom, and trial
and error can decide.
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