Stories of crime,stories of suffering: A narrative perspective on ethical issues in criminal justice counselling

Counsellors working with prisoners often listen to stories that are both stories of crime and stories of suffering. From a criminal justice perspective, the suffering of offenders is deliberately inflicted as punishment. From a counselling perspective, however, responding to the suffering of a client and even trying to relieve it is a basic ethical concern. So counsellors, working with offenders, may face the ethical question of how to integrate a response to the suffering of offenders with a response to crime, especially when confronted with stories of cruel, violent crimes. In this paper, it is argued that a narrative perspective on counselling offers a framework in which these responses may be integrated. Here, the principle of recognizing privileged authorship of persons is crucial. The concepts of ‘double listening for implicit others’ and ‘relationally rich stories’ are developed, which are based on concepts and ideas from narrative therapy. These serve as a first step of translating the narrative ethical framework to counselling practice.     

Tales of the Absent Father: Applying the “Story” Metaphor in Family Therapy

Father-absent families often function with a lively father-presence conveyed by stories the family members share. The metaphor of “story” proposed by social constructionist and narrative approaches to therapy helps us to conceptualize the role these family stories play. The story metaphor draws attention to four issues: the rendition of what is said and unsaid about the father; the connections among past, present, and future ideas about father and family; the reciprocal influences of expression and experience, seen in the family's stories and interactions; and the impact on the family and the therapeutic process of dominant narratives about father-absence. Exploration of these issues demonstrates how client and therapist stories about the absent father mediate the impact of father-absence on the family.     

Towards a new philosophy of education: Extending the conversational metaphor for thinking

Recently, feminists like Jane Roland-Martin, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, and others have advocated a conversational metaphor for thinking and rationality, and our image of the rational person. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl refers to thinking as a “constant interconnecting of representations of experiences and an extension of how we hear ourselves and others. There are numerous disadvantages to thinking about thinking as a conversation.We think there are difficulties in accepting the current formulation of the conversational metaphor without question. First, there is danger that we will lose important dialectical connections like that between the self and society. Second, the conversational metaphor alone cannot fully express the way conversations are constructed. We will want to take up the notion of narrative as a metaphor for thinking advocated by Susan Bordo, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jerome Bruner, and others, including Mary Belenky and her colleagues.Eventually, we want to champion narrative and the dramatic narrative of culture as a metaphor for thinking that involves such expressions as sights, insights, silences, as well as sounds, moments of mood and poetic moments. The dramatic narrative provides the structural possibilities needed to criticize certain kinds of conversations, in order to talk about the relations of public and private, self and society and most importantly, about the drama of our lives within and without.The dramatic narrative for thinking helps dispel the dangerous dualisms of mind and body that not even conversation or narration alone can banish, and allows us to frame questions about education that do not require us to separate mind from body. The dramatic narrative metaphor for thinking lets us show who we are, act out what we think, and reconstruct rationality to reflect what many women, and some men, do.     

Towards a new philosophy of education: Extending the conversational metaphor for thinking

Recently, feminists like Jane Roland-Martin, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, and others have advocated a conversational metaphor for thinking and rationality, and our image of the rational person. Elizabeth Young-Bruehl refers to thinking as a constant interconnecting of representations of experiences and an extension of how we hear ourselves and others. There are numerous disadvantages to thinking about thinking as a conversation.We think there are difficulties in accepting the current formulation of the conversational metaphor without question. First, there is danger that we will lose important dialectical connections like that between the self and society. Second, the conversational metaphor alone cannot fully express the way conversations are constructed. We will want to take up the notion of narrative as a metaphor for thinking advocated by Susan Bordo, Alasdair MacIntyre, Jerome Bruner, and others, including Mary Belenky and her colleagues.Eventually, we want to champion narrative and the dramatic narrative of culture as a metaphor for thinking that involves such expressions as sights, insights, silences, as well as sounds, moments of mood and poetic moments. The dramatic narrative provides the structural possibilities needed to criticize certain kinds of conversations, in order to talk about the relations of public and private, self and society and most importantly, about the drama of our lives within and without.The dramatic narrative for thinking helps dispel the dangerous dualisms of mind and body that not even conversation or narration alone can banish, and allows us to frame questions about education that do not require us to separate mind from body. The dramatic narrative metaphor for thinking lets us show who we are, act out what we think, and reconstruct rationality to reflect what many women, and some men, do.     

A Narrative Approach to Supporting Students Diagnosed With Learning Disabilities

Students diagnosed with learning disabilities experience many challenges that school counselors may address through narrative therapy. Narrative therapy is a postmodern, social constructionist approach based on the theoretical construct that individuals create their notions of truth and meaning of life through interpretive stories. This article identifies potential challenges students diagnosed with learning disabilities encounter, provides an orientation to narrative therapy, and offers a case example illustrating the application of narrative therapy with this client population.     

The Cocreation of Crazy Patchworks: Becoming Rhizomatic in Systemic Therapy

In the field of systemic therapy, there has been much discussion recently about the narrative self. This concept refers to the idea that the self is narratively constructed in and through the stories which someone tells about him/herself. The story is thereby not only viewed as a metaphor for selfhood: Selfhood is not compared to a story, it is a story. But what kind of story are we talking about here? If the self is a story, what does that story look like? These questions are explored in this article. Starting from the possibilities and limitations of traditional and postmodern visions on the self as a story, an alternative vision is illustrated. By considering the self as a rhizomatic story, we not only create a useful view of the way narrative selfhood is constructed within a therapy context, but we also stimulate therapists to coconstruct—together with their clients—patchworks of self‐stories. By using story fragments of our own practice, we illustrate the rhizomatic thinking and its possibilities in therapy.     

Some Hypotheses about Hesitations and their Nonverbal Expression in Family Therapy Practice

When people seek therapy they have stories to tell. In the course of the therapeutic conversation the clients continually make selections about what they want to tell, and what they want to keep silent. In this article the author focuses on the border zone between the said and the not-yet-said, and proposes three hypotheses about the client's hesitations about speaking in the family therapy session. In these hypotheses 'hesitation' is used as a metaphor to give meaning to some nonverbal utterances of clients in such a way that space is opened up in a respectful way for as-yet untold stories. I suggest that it is fruitful to think of certain nonverbal utterances of the clients as hesitations to proceed with the conversation, and to use these nonverbal utterances, in the line of Tom Andersen's thinking (1995), as a starting point for a respectful dialogue with the family about the good reasons they might have not to speak. Not only can this open up space for as-yet unspoken stories, it can also help the therapist to establish a collaborative therapeutic relationship with the family. These ideas are illustrated with several case studies.     

Micro‐analysis of a therapist‐generated metaphor referring to the position of a parentified child in the family

The purpose of this exploratory study is to develop a deeper understanding of the way in which the metaphorical language of therapists evolves in dialogue with a client over the course of a therapeutic session. We first briefly report on a study in which we categorized the metaphors used by therapists in twelve therapy sessions with a role‐played client. Then we focus on an intensive micro‐analysis of one particular metaphor that was introduced in the session by one particular therapist in the categorization study: the metaphor of a fireman in the family. Our analysis allowed us a detailed look at some of the ways in which metaphorical language opens dialogical space in the session to talk about the position of parentification of the client and about the price she has to pay for this position in terms of preoccupying worries and loneliness. Furthermore our analysis revealed the delicate dialogical nature of the therapeutic process in which, in talk, the therapist takes the client's experiencing into account all the time.     

Psychotherapy and schizophrenia: An analysis of requirements of an individual psychotherapy for persons with profoundly disorganized selves

Many emerging views of outcome from schizophrenia emphasize that persons must recover a sense of their own identity, agency, and personal worth. While this is intuitively appealing and consistent with a wide range of literature, it raises the issue of how best to facilitate this. In this article we explore how integrative psychotherapy might address issues of narrative and recovery from schizophrenia among persons experiencing more profound levels of disorganization. Illustrated with a case example we explore in particular the barriers posed to psychotherapy by a client's cacophonous self-presentations. We then describe techniques from an integrative perspective that might help therapists enter dialogue with persons so afflicted. Our claim is that psychotherapy can revitalize dialogues within the client and between the client and others that enable the reconstruction of a personal narrative from which a life plan might be articulated.     

Innovation Through Tradition: Rediscovering the “Humanist” in the Medical Humanities

Throughout its fifty-year history, the role of the medical humanist and even the name “medical humanities” has remained raw, dynamic and contested. What do we mean when we call ourselves “humanists” and our practice “medical humanities?” To address these questions, we turn to the concept of origin narratives. After explaining the value of these stories, we focus on one particularly rich origin narrative of the medical humanities by telling the story of how a group of educators, ethicists, and scholars struggling to define their relatively new field rediscovered the studia humanitatis, a Renaissance curriculum for learning and teaching. Our origin narrative is composed of two intertwined stories—the history of the studia humanitatis itself and the story of the scholars who rediscovered it. We argue that as an origin narrative the studia humanitatis grounds the medical humanities as both an engaged moral practice and pedagogical project. In the latter part of the paper, we use this origin narrative to show how medical humanists working in translational science can use their understanding of their historical roots to do meaningful work in the world.     

Fiction as an aid to therapy: a narrative and family rationale for practice

Stories of literary merit written by others (novels, plays, etc.) can be used in therapy to help people tell their personal stories. Existing approaches to the use of fiction draw mainly from psychoanalytic assumptions. From a narrative and family perspective, the claim is that when persons of all ages spontaneously report on the content of a favourite story, this story functions as a 'safe' vehicle for them to talk about their own lives, experiences and emotions that have been marginalized or shaped to fit transgenerational themes. In addition, the form of a favourite story can help in the transformation of a non-intelligible and/or pessimistic self-narrative. A case example is used to illustrate the suggested steps for working with clients on a favourite novel. The therapist encourages family member(s) to claim ownership of the assumed experiences, wishes and positive life developments of their favourite characters, and to help them see the narrative structures and linguistic features they have used for the various retellings of the story as properties of their own self-narratives.     

Narrative Sexual Identity Therapy

Sexual identity therapy is an alternative to the two polarized positions of sexual reorientation therapy and gay-integrative therapy for clients who present with sexual identity concerns. This alternative model focuses on sexual identity—the private and public acts of identifying and communicating one's sexual preferences—and how the decision to do so is informed by dominant stories about what sexual attractions mean to a client. As one expression of sexual identity therapy, this paper presents narrative sexual identity therapy, an approach that utilizes a narrative therapeutic approach and techniques to facilitate exploration of dominant narratives and counter-narratives that speak to sexual identity with the goal of achieving a synthesis that reflects felt congruence of clients' beliefs/values and behavior/identity.     

后现代叙事心理治疗探幽

近15年来国际心理治疗界出现一种由科学隐喻向叙事隐喻转变的潮流。它突出了心理问题的多维性和生活方式的多样性,强调整体联系的视角,与中国文化中的“大人”思想相契合。对叙事心理治疗做探讨,分为三个部分:什么是叙事心理治疗,介绍对叙事心理治疗的整体理解;叙事心理治疗的哲学渊源,介绍叙事心理治疗的理论基础;伦理问题,探讨叙事心理治疗在组织实施过程中权力关系与责任分布。     

Co-Authoring “We-ness” and Stories of Intimacy

Drawing from narrative ideas and practices, we consider how individuals, couples, and couples with therapists co-author and co-edit stories of “we-ness,” a kind of relational consciousness, and intimacy in the context of research interviews. Adapting the “small story” narrative approach of Michael Bamberg, and recognizing researcher reflexivity, we present details from two separate studies into: (1) how cohabitating couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” in and beyond a research interview; and (2) how young married couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” by describing how they made significant decisions together through difficult yet successful conversations. Inviting such stories of “we-ness” can talk this intimacy into being. We relate the processes and outcomes of these studies to using a narrative approach to help individuals and couples with concerns about intimacy within the context of therapy.     

Academic Course Combining Psychological Skills Training and Life Skills Education for University Students and Student-Athletes

In Part II, we present two case studies of erotic transference and countertransference in sport psychology service delivery. We interviewed two seasoned practitioners, both with long histories of working with athletes. These sport psychologists represent two extremes of the spectrum when encountering the erotic in service delivery. One participant's story is about denial, suppression, and repression of anything that hints of the erotic in practitioner-client relationships. The other sport psychologist's story is about a nearly unbridled reveling in the erotic with a client. The practitioners are easy to condemn, one for ignorance and lack of awareness of self and others, the other for adolescent fantasies and objectification of his client. But those responses are facile and uncharitable. We present these two cases as examples, albeit extreme ones, of how truly complex the erotic is in service delivery. Their stories illustrate, in sometimes painful and graphic ways, what it is to be human, all-too-human, in our encounters with the people we serve.     

How Might Personal Construct Psychology Benefit from Narrative Approaches?

Constructivist and narrative psychotherapies share an understanding of the self as fragmented, relational, distributed, and discursive. Collaboration of these two modalities might offer a synergistic perspective for working with people. Hermeneutically driven therapy concerns personal development, which is seen as a unique effort of the individual to narrate different stories about him- or herself and others. The therapeutic process is viewed as a raising of awareness about marginalized discourses and empowering alternative voices. Furthermore, the making of an alternative story implies a new understanding of oneself, new interpretation of the past, and anticipation of the future. A case study is presented in which these principles are implemented in therapeutic practice.     

The Role of Defense in the Life Story

In modern societies, adults typically provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose by constructing self-defining life stories that serve as their identities. Such stories are told to others and to an internalized audience or listener who serves as an ultimate judge and interpreter of the narrative. Defense mechanisms specify narrative strategies that persons use to shape how their lives are told to others and to their internalized audiences. Life events and experiences are incorporated into a life story to the extent that the internalized audience can make sense of the telling. Defenses function to make some stories more tellable than they might otherwise be and to keep other potentially storied accounts from ever reaching the status of being told.     

“心灵鸡汤”对温度知觉、他人评价和自我评价的影响

本研究基于具身认知观点和概念隐喻理论,采用三个实验探讨了 “心灵鸡汤”对环境温度的感知觉影响、对陌生他人人品评价的影响以及对自我人格特质评定的影响。结果发现,“心灵鸡汤”的阅读能有效提高个体对环境温度的评定,且不存在性别差异;阅读“心灵鸡汤”后倾向于对陌生人的人品有更高的积极评定;“心灵鸡汤”对自我评定不存在显著影响。     

The Art of Reflection: Turning the Strange into the Familiar

There are a great many useful articles on the dynamics and pragmatics of reflecting teams but few articles address what constitutes a good or inept reflection and why. I provide a conceptual model for thinking about what a good reflection does, distinguishing it from a nice reflection. With some further refinements in place, I then illustrate how reflections can be part of any relationship, not just clinical ones. We have opportunities to make them and to recognize when others make them to us. By using examples from my personal life—as a grandmother, daughter, radio listener, cancer survivor, and client—I attempt to ease the personal/professional binary, a project of mine for the last 35 years. In the second part of the article, I address how writing can serve reflection. Although best offered at the moment one is called for, it is never too late for a reflection. Writing allows people to offer reflections after the fact to those who have shared their stories. Sometimes, it is to ourselves we offer those reflections, when the reflector has long since dropped the thread of obligation or interest. I provide an example of working with iconic imagery to unpack meaning so that reflection can eventually take place, allowing integration to proceed, facilitating the strange becoming the familiar.     

A Universe of Stories

The complete adoption of a narrative paradigm for therapy is proposed and its implications and possibilities spelled out, especially for life in a post-modern world that lacks any objective frame of reference. In the post-modern sensibility, the story is set free to perform as simply a story that allows for re-invention as the story-teller finds a voice rooted in the person's own experience and in the connection of her story to those of others, and to larger stories of culture and humanity. The realization that we are all characters in each other's stories as well as our own reminds us that our stories only go forward as we act in ways that also forward the stories of others. A hermeneutics for such therapy validates and questions all points of view so that they do not harden into stories that are assumed to be objectively true.