The Storied Self: The Search for Coherence Amidst Constant Change

When children come to therapy, they come to play. Children organize their experiences by pretending and enacting incidents in the here and now. When adults come to therapy, they come to tell their stories, constructing a unitary, continuous sense of being by matching feelings to events and events to sequences in the immediate medium of another’s mind. In this talk, I will focus on how narrative emerges from breaks in the canonical ways of a culture, whether it is the culture of the home, the workplace, or a way of being together that emerges in the clinical situation. I will look at narrative first from a developmental perspective, considering how children start by describing “timeless” routines of their surround and move only gradually to elaborating particular episodes that have to do with violations of these routines. We will look at telling experiences as falling along a continuum,on one end chaotic and nonlinear, on the other rehearsed and rigidly adhering to a cultural template. We will consider the ideal middle ground of the coherent narrative that remains stable and yet open to revision. We will also examine how an ever-evolving self emerges from this process. Last, we will consider applications of these ideas to the clinical situation, advocating an elaborative rather than an interpretive stance.