Handbook of Narrative Psychotherapy for Children, Adults, and Families

Theory and Practice

Jan Olthof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429914416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Handbook Narrative Psychotherapy for Children, Adults and Families combines philosophical, scientific and theoretical insights in the field of narrative psychotherapy and links them to sources of inspiration such as poetry, film, literature and art under the common denominator 'narrative thinking'. Sections on theoretical issues alternate with a large number of case histories drawn from different therapeutic contexts. The reader can browse at will through the many examples of therapeutic sessions, in some cases including literal transcriptions, in which narrativity in all its forms is the point of departure. What language does the body speak? What messages do seemingly random slips of the tongue convey? How can a painting help a client to find words for his or her story? The discussion of the 'logic of abduction' demonstrates the importance of metaphor, and special attention is given to the processes of creating a therapeutic context and defining a therapeutic framework.

Part I
Aspects of Narrative Thinking

Chapter One
Nomadic thought: thought on its travels

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving”

—Lao Tzu

Introduction

This book is based on the premise that if the nature of human beings is “storied”—that is, made of stories—and a story is a text, the most helpful diagnostic tool is textual analysis. The foundations for this narrative paradigm for psychotherapy were laid in the earlier work, De mens als verhaal (“The storied nature of humankind”; Olthof & Vermetten, 1994). The present book takes up the same thread and continues this journey around the world of language in psychotherapy. Words combine to make sentences; sentences combine into paragraphs, and a succession of paragraphs constitutes a chapter. Taken together, the chapters make up a text—a story, in the present context. A narrative paradigm for psychotherapy is based on the assumption that thought is multifaceted and multivocal, and embraces difference—that is, in the post-structuralist sense of différance.

Embracing this narrative perspective, psychotherapy tells the stories of thought’s travels, the places visited by the words, the memory of language, local conditions, and contextual and place-bound knowledge. It speaks of embodied, affective, and earthly wisdom. Basing itself on the text, the actual words that are used, this book travels through history, through universal narratives or grand récits, through mythology and art. It travels through poetry and literature, and through films and plays.

We label this narrative, storytelling thought, using a term coined by Gilles Deleuze, “nomadic thought”. Nomadic thought in philosophy is inspired by the spirit of postmodernism and by the concept of différance, as developed by philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard. The philosophers of différance frequently invoke Nietzsche as a primary source of inspiration. With nomadic thought as a travelling companion, psychotherapy can draw on different domains of knowledge without the need for thought to take up permanent residence in the citadel of fixed meanings.

Psychotherapy can pass through familiar domains, such as biology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. It can pass through narratology and the world of stories and other texts; through semiotics and semantics, religions and mythologies, novels, fairy tales, and films. It can travel through time and through history, which relates how others have expressed answers to the same questions, in other places and other times. On its journey, thought can pass through philosophy, literary theory, theology, and narrative-based schools of psychology and sociology. This implies that nomadic thought can have more than one “home base”. It returns from its journeys, tells its travel tales, and reflects on the experiences gained along the way.

In consequence, this is an intertextual book. It inscribes itself into many other texts and draws inspiration from many texts to make new stories. It forges new links between numerous texts and makes new tracks, revealing new approaches to the practice of psychotherapy. It allows itself free rein and creates an open space that provides scope for a constant proliferation of different ways of thinking and different creative approaches.

This book embraces différance, and the above-mentioned thinkers were key sources of inspiration. Perhaps because narrative psychotherapy has drawn such inspiration from the philosophers of différance, its development has been strongest within systems thinking and family therapy. In systems thinking, narrative psychotherapy rests on the shoulders of numerous progenitors, without whom family therapy would not exist.

Gregory Bateson was the first person to apply systems thinking within the world of psychiatry and psychotherapy. He set up a research group on communication in 1952. Besides communication processes in families, the group also studied other subjects, including animals at play. The project continued until 1962. Bateson’s main associates in this work were John Weakland, Jay Haley and Richard Fisch. Haley describes the history of this project, which had a strong influence on psychotherapy, with regard to human relationships and communication (Haley, 1981). Don Jackson joined the group later on, when the focus shifted to communication processes in the families of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. It was then that the term “double bind” was coined—a concept that would later become very widely known.

The research team drew inspiration from Milton Erickson, who founded the field of psychotherapeutic hypnosis. Erickson brilliantly highlighted the power of language, context and suggestion in the many creative and inspiring approaches he presented in case histories. Bateson’s research team trained with him, studied his work, reflected on it, and disseminated it.

The idea of working with entire families was a paradigm shift: previously, therapists had worked solely with individual clients, and the primary conceptual and therapeutic framework was psychoanalysis. As the 1960s progressed, various therapists started involving family members in sessions with clients. These included Salvador Minuchin in Philadelphia, who treated patients from disadvantaged, poverty-scarred families. Minuchin’s associate Dick Auerswald subsequently cast his net even wider, including members of the extended family, neighbours, and healthcare services.

The Child Guidance Clinic, the institution headed by Minuchin and Auerswald, was very active in training family therapists, and some of its staff—such as Haley and Braulio Montalvo— later attracted followers of their own. I myself spent some time there as a guest, observing their work.

The Mental Research Institute headed by Paul Watzlawick and John Weakland was founded in Palo Alto. Together with their colleagues Richard Fisch, Don Jackson, Virginia Satir and Janet Beavin, they wrote a great many articles and books, two of which—Pragmatics of Human Communication (1976) and Change (1974)—were truly groundbreaking. These books were based on the ideas developed by Bateson’s research group. Watzlawick, Weakland and their associates were prolific researchers, and trained numerous therapists in what was initially called communication theory and later became known as social constructionism in psychotherapy.

Two groups were formed in Italy: one in Milan, around the child psychiatrist Mara Selvini Palazzoli, and another in Rome, the central figure of which was Maurizio Andolfi. At the Ackerman Institute in New York, therapists such as Peggy Papp, Peggy Penn, and Olga Silverstein introduced a feminist approach to psychotherapy, along with theories of gender, class, and culture. These early developments of family therapy are described in Lynn Hoffman’s book Foundations of Family Therapy (Hoffman, 1981).

Up to then, families were seen—under the influence of systems thinking—in terms of a reality to be observed from a distance, whose dynamics could be decoded. The notion of a participating consciousness, or observer-dependent observation, had not yet achieved currency. Bateson’s group started to study the dynamics of family interactions and the context surrounding each individual. The period during which families were viewed as units or entities that could be observed and described had been accompanied by an upsurge of enthusiasm for charting patterns and circular processes. Terms like homeostasis, feedback and rule formation were borrowed from systems thinking.

This was the earliest experimental research into communication patterns. On the one hand, the trend led to a depreciation of the therapist: after all, certain mechanisms could be examined, it was believed, separately from any particular person, time, or place. Meanwhile, a contrary movement grew up that saw the therapist’s role as crucial, particularly in experience-based approaches to working with families, as exemplified by Nathan Ackerman, Carl Whitaker, and Satir. These therapists developed a style of their own from which many drew inspiration. People were still searching for fruitful concepts. Another influential figure was Iván Böszörményi-Nagy, who developed the concept of loyalty within families and generations (Böszörményi-Nagy, 1986, 1987).

The earliest developments in systems thinking, sometimes referred to as “first-order cybernetics”, highlighted equilibrium, steering, regulation, and control. In the 1980s, under the influence of two very different bodies of theory—social constructivism and quantum mechanics—the focus shifted to studying reality. It became clear that the observer influences reality in the process of observation. There is no objective, external reality; reality is constructed by the observer, while actively ordering his or her observations. The influence of biology and constructivist ideas emerged in the work of biologists such as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and that of the scientist Heinz von Foerster and the philosopher Ernst von Glasersfeld (Dell, 1985; Efran & Lukens, 1985; Maturana & Varela, 1992). Maturana and Varela introduced the concept of the “autopoietic system”, a system that organises itself. Absorbing elements of these theories, family therapy too started to focus on the therapist’s influence as an observer and on the participating consciousness with which reality is constructed.

At the end of the twentieth century, language and semantics moved centre stage: family therapy came to be seen more as a dialogue or conversation in which people construct meaning. Systems were regarded primarily as linguistic in nature, and rather than focusing narrowly on the family, attention widened to include all the participants in this conversation around the problem. Anderson and Goolishian coined the phrase “problem-determined system” (Anderson & Goolishian, 1988). The practice of psychotherapy took on a narrative quality (Bruner, 1999), and nomadic thought made its entrance.

In Milwaukee, Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg devised their “solution-focused” approach (Berg, 1994; De Shazer, 1985). In Norway, Tom Andersen worked on creating a “reflecting team” (Andersen, 1987, 1991). In Australia and New Zealand, Michael White and David Epston introduced the ideas of postmodernism and the philosophy of Foucault into family therapy through what they call the “dominant discourse”. They developed ideas about the externalisation of problems to liberate clients from a “problem identity” (Epston, 1994; White, 2007; White & Epston, 1990).

The above brief journey through the history of family therapy has inevitably left out a great many names. This outline is intended solely to emphasise the fact that this book could not have been written without all the developmental work done by our predecessors. For a detailed history of family therapy, readers are referred to the works of Lynn Hoffman (Hoffman, 1981, 2002). Although some of these earlier methods and views are now seen as outmoded, and certain schools of thought are described rather dismissively as “modernist”, family therapy could not have matured to the form it has today without them.

Before looking in detail at the practice of narrative psychotherapy, we also need to take a brief tour of the philosophical background. The ideal of progress has occupied the centre ground of Western thought since the Enlightenment. The primacy of reason, it was held, would lead humanity to achieve evermore progress on its way to a truly humane society. This post-Enlightenment or “modern” thought is based on the principle that human beings are fundamentally reasonable creatures, and that reason will naturally lead to the further evolution of humankind. Still, with the shocks sustained by the horrors of the Second World War and its death camps, confidence in the reasonableness of human beings was shattered in the latter half of the twentieth century. We have gradually been forced to admit that the primacy of reason is a myth. Indeed, it is a myth that leads to the exercise of power over, the domination and exclusion of, large groups of human beings, making them into refugees. Postmodernism, as an umbrella term for many ways of thinking in diverse fields— such as art and architecture, philosophy and psychology, history and theology—therefore seeks to define an alternative to the belief in progress through the operation of reason.

Postmodernism can be seen as a kind of marking time, a space for retreat, an interspace from which to explore possible new avenues of thought. It is a juncture or hub at which many paths come together and from which many paths depart, paths that lead to unknown destinations, that need to be trodden, described, and discovered. Growing doubts as to which path to pursue may lead to cynicism, despair, relativism, or solipsism.

Rosi Braidotti, inspired by the work of Deleuze, sees the nomad as an alternative to the reason-driven human being, and nomadic thought as a viable alternative (Braidotti, 1993a). We can take the concepts of “marking time” and/or “space for retreat” as denoting a haven or “free space”: a space cleared of fixed meanings in which freedom can be recaptured, allowing new ways of thought to evolve. Indeed, the title of Braidotti’s book on the subject (Beelden van de leegte) means “Images of the void”. A “free space” can restore the liberty of thought, enabling it to break away from the stranglehold of the dominant discourse, shuffle off the primacy of reason, and follow a path away from the great main road of rational thought.

In this void or “free space”, feminist thought too feels the freedom to strike out along new paths. Différance is a key concept in feminist theory. Braidotti, following the other theorists of différance, argues that Western thought has functioned through the binary oppositions of dualist tradition, which thus places “the other”—other human beings and “the other” as an abstraction—in categories separate from the subject. In consequence, “different from” becomes “less than”. Differing from, or différance, are words and phrases occupied by relations of power. Just as different from becomes less than, so too does other become worth less and inferior. Many groups are excluded on this basis of this dualistic thinking in terms of binary oppositions. Differences are not respected but subsumed into, and reduced to, one standard unit. Thought is reduced to a common denominator, within which truth, rationalism, order and unity are the main principles with which the subject is postulated and positioned in opposition to and above the object, human beings in opposition to and above nature and the body, men in opposition to and above women, white in opposition to and above black, and the Western world in opposition to and above the rest of the world. Differences must be erased and subordinated to a hierarchy in which the One is supreme. Identity is created by unity and concord: one Voice, one Identity, one Centre, one dominant mode of thought that adheres to the primacy of Reason and Nietzsche’s “will to truth”, and which, by thinking in terms of power, excludes large sections of the population and numerous ideas from that supreme One. Difference is subordinated to unity. The primacy of Reason, Logos, has become a powerful instrument of exclusion: the exclusion of other modes of thought that do not correspond to the Logos.

Difference-based thought seeks to avoid a dualistic perspective, and instead to define difference in positive terms. This opens up space for different modes of thought. Luce Irigaray has examined the ways in which the Logos excludes the feminine, and sets out to devise a feminine mode of speech, writing, and imagination: parler femme and écriture féminine (in Braidotti, 1991; Rhode-Dachser, 1982).

Lyotard posits “micrologies” as alternatives to the grand récits or metanarratives of and about the truth, which reveal the dominant male discourse (Lyotard, 1984). A micrology or “little story” is bound to a specific time, place, context, and person. A micrology is not related to “truth” or “unity”; rather, it conveys something of the complexity of life, it reveals something about the absent, the invisible, the silent, and the concealed (Assoun, 1987; Deleuze, 1976, 1993; Foucault & Deleuze, 1981; Scheepers, 1987). Deleuze refers to this mode of thought as nomadic, which denotes a critical interrogation of thought and ideas. Nomadic in this sense means peripatetic, in motion, becoming and moving in a particular direction. Ideas thus become mobile, vibrant identities, which resist occupation and exclusion. Nomadic thought seeks to release thought from the straitjacket of the Logos and give it back its liberty, vitality, beauty, and difference: all the paths are opened up again, and the beaten—not to say time-worn—paths can be abandoned. New stories can come into being and tales told about alternative routes.

Nomadic thought roams by definition across disciplines. It identifies and gathers valuable ideas from a wide range of sources, and discovers new applications and combinations eclectically along the way. It creates a consciousness of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PERMISSIONS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION Psychotherapy as a craft
• FOREWORD Voices of many sources of inspiration
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PRELUDE
• PART I: ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE THINKING
• PART II: NARRATIVITY IN ACTION
• REFERENCES
• INDEX