The Person in Narrative Therapy

A Post-structural, Foucauldian Account

M. Guilfoyle

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137380555
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book arguesthat narrative practice does not have a coherent formulation of personhood in the way one finds in other fields, such as psychoanalysis and cognitive-behavioural therapy.It examines the post-structural principles that underpin narrative practice, which make available powerful conceptual tools for theorizing the person.

1

The Problem: Constitution versus Agency

Who is the person in narrative therapy? And why do we not have a theory of the person in the way that our colleagues in psychoanalysis, in cognitive behavioural therapy, and in the humanistic or existential approaches have?

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) wrote: ‘Everyone has wishes that he would prefer not to disclose to other people, and wishes that he will not even admit to himself’ (p. 160). This statement captures what is often considered ‘the ABC of psychoanalysis’: a principle that unifies its approach to dreams, neuroses, psychoses, and everyday life (Borch-Jacobsen, 1988, p. 2). This is a view of the person as one who is constituted by the dynamic tensions between unconscious desires and wishes on the one side – those that cannot be admitted to oneself or to others – and the socialized, ordered, and integrating ego on the other. Out of this basic principle, it is possible to begin to formulate an understanding of the person. So fundamental is this principle that psychoanalytic textbooks typically outline some version of it, such that any undergraduate student could be expected to have an answer to the question: ‘Who is the person in Freudian psychoanalysis?’

But the task is not so simple for the student or even the practitioner of narrative therapy. Why have we not developed an explicit formulation of the person? Our difficulty with this by-now standard practice in therapeutic theory stems from our understanding of knowledge and how it works. In this regard, we are indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, for whom knowledge (e.g., a theory of the person) is not an objective tool that represents reality in a neutral way, but a social product operating in the service of power dynamics. As such, knowledge should be seen not as a description of reality, but as a series of ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 49). Hence, for us, knowledge is not just a knowing, but a doing, which thereby ends up producing its articulations into social reality. A theory of the person is also a way of acting on the person.

Michael White (1993) echoes Foucault in his adoption of what he terms a ‘constitutionalist perspective’, which includes a rejection of the notion that the person can be known as an essential being; as one who is this or that in essence (p. 125). For White, this is a stance that

refutes foundationalist assumptions of objectivity, essentialism, and representationalism. It proposes . . . that essentialist notions are paradoxical in that they provide descriptions that are specifying of life; that these notions obscure the operations of power. And the constitutionalist perspective proposes that the descriptions that we have of life are not representations or reflections of lives as lived, but are directly constitutive of life; that these descriptions . . . have real effects in the shaping of life.

(1993, p. 125)

In a later work, White (2004) elaborates further on the dangers of claiming objective knowledge about the person. Any such knowledge, allowing the therapist to make the claim, ‘This is who you really are’, amounts in the end to a prescription, which presses the person to construct understandings of himself or herself in terms of that knowledge. White is concerned that the identification of a single organizing dynamic, principle, or force governing a person’s life – such as we see in Freudian psychoanalysis – might promote a ‘single-voiced’ vision of the person, and limit his or her options for living (p. 135). Furthermore, in their stipulations of the ‘true nature’ of the person (p. 135), such knowledges promote norms which justify practices of exclusion, management, or control of those persons who seem to deviate from this natural standard of personhood.

Following this argument, then, we might suppose that Freud’s psychoanalytic vision of the person is essentialist insofar as it alludes to some core dynamic that lies inherent in the person, that it misunderstands its own status as only a way of interpreting or representing the person, and that it thereby obscures from view the constitutive, prescriptive effects it has on persons’ lives. Furthermore, its single-voiced nature – its reduction of human complexity and multiplicity to a few core principles – inevitably denigrates other possibilities for life, which may, for instance, be described in terms of denials, projections, somatizations, and so on, of the person’s allegedly true unconscious wishes. And lastly, the classical Freudian psychoanalytic view enables the construction of an entire social system of relations such that deviations from its prescriptions come to be socially devalued. For example, and as we shall see in the next chapter, psychoanalytic ways of knowing played a significant role in the pathologization of homosexuality, not just in the consulting room, but also in the broader culture. In principle, the same concerns could be expressed for any theoretical attempt to know the person.

It follows that the narrative practitioner should tread very carefully in this area. Neither Foucault nor White wishes to be in the business of personal and social control. And so our thought and our books tend to stay away from trying to answer too precisely this question: who is the person?

Nevertheless, I feel moved to ask it for two main reasons. First, it seems to me that we perform, even if we do not always articulate, certain understandings of the person in our practices. The intended influence and directionality of our practices – we engage with purpose – indicates our sense of knowing something, and this something is performed, despite our fears of its wide-ranging constitutive effects. What is this something that we know but seldom speak of? And second, I ask the question because, as I will argue throughout this work, the lack of a clear conceptualization of the person leaves the constitutionalist narrative approach with a significant limitation: it struggles to adequately account for the phenomena of personal agency and resistance. This means that it cannot properly explain one of the core conditions that must be met (i.e., an agentive, resisting human being) for its own practices to function.

And so I will attempt to work my way around the question, but, cognizant of White’s warnings, I aim to do so without lapsing into an essentialist or normative position. In the process I will argue for a post-structural, multi-voiced account of the person which might usefully inform our narrative practices.

Foucault’s human being and the problem of agency

If we are in some sense Foucauldian post-structuralists, and I think we are, we would do well to begin our journey by considering some of Foucault’s words on the subject of the individual human being. He famously and contentiously proclaimed ‘the end of man’, arguing that the view of the human figure as the sovereign creator of meaning and experience is now ‘in the process of disappearing’ (1966, p. 420). Instead of crediting the person with the ability to stand as agent or cause of his or her life, an ‘originator’ of meaning, Foucault saw the individual as ‘a variable and complex function of discourse’ (1984, p. 118). As a function of discourse, which itself is inextricably tied up with social power dynamics, the individual is rendered ‘the product of power’ (1983, p. xiv); ‘one of its prime effects’ (1980c, p. 98). In other words, as human beings we are constituted by, and we are by-products of, the social power dynamics in which we live our lives.

Such understandings of the person are often celebrated by Foucauldian supporters as representing an advance over the naïve form of humanism that continues to shape so much of our thinking in the Western world (Falzon, 1998), according to which the individual is a sovereign, self-determining figure, who creates or authors himself or herself, as well as the world in which he or she lives. In a sense, Foucault reverses the image: the world creates the individual. As Paul Veyne notes, speaking of Foucault’s vision:

What is made [here, the individual as discursive subject] . . . is explained by what went into its making at each moment of history; we are wrong to imagine that the making, the practice, is explained on the basis of what is made.

(Veyne, 1997, pp. 160–161)

By seeing the person as a product of the society and the time in which he or she lives, Foucault denies the individual the sovereign capacity to make the world in his or her own image, and according to his or her own desires. For supporters of Foucault, the significant advantage of this idea is that persons who are oppressed, marginalized, discriminated against, or even those who are dissatisfied with their lives, are no longer expected to simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Instead, Foucault usefully draws attention to the fact that it is power, social organization, and history – not the forces of personal choice, character, or willpower – that accounts for persons’ locations in these disadvantaged positions. In this way he shows up the naïve individualism often associated with humanist discourse and its emphasis on living according to one’s choices and free will.

But, in what Thiele (1990) has described as a ‘remarkably uniform’ debate, with two clear-cut and predictable positions being adopted (p. 907), other less sympathetic scholars took Foucault to task for precisely this stance. Yes, he highlights social power dynamics in a way that many humanist formulations obscure from view, but at what cost? For many, he took too much away from the individual as such. Hall (2000) saw Foucault’s reduction of the person to a discursive ‘position’ as a ‘one-dimensional’ vision (p. 23). And Jurgen Habermas – one of Foucault’s most significant philosophical contemporaries, and in relation to whom Foucault has been described as a kind of ‘wayward twin’ (Conway, 1999, p. 76) – held that from Foucault’s perspective, ‘individuals can only be perceived as exemplars, as standardized products, of some discourse formation – as individual copies that are mechanically punched out’ (1990, p. 293). Foucault’s emphasis on power, for these readers, reduced the individual to whatever power and society told him or her to be. The individual, as such, seemed to be erased. Such critical readings of the Foucauldian human being, as a docile, manufactured puppet of power, are to be found in some measure in the works of numerous other scholars, such as Slavoj Žižek (2000), Nancy Fraser (1989), Charles Taylor (1986), and Edward Said (1986).

I list the names of these critics here for a rhetorical purpose: for some reason, many very clever people felt that Foucault did not make any theoretical room for a vision of the human being as an active, agentive figure who was capable of resisting power. Was he not killing off the individual as a social force in its own right? Indeed, Foucault’s constitutionalist perspective of the person, which has been carried wholeheartedly into narrative practice (Freedman and Combs, 1996; White, 1993), is increasingly being seen as profoundly pessimistic (Heller, 1996), with critics bemoaning almost in single voice its apparent inability to allow for a cogent and coherent account of human agency and resistance.

It is worth noting that Foucault’s sympathizers have responded to this agency critique, often arguing that there is more nuance in his work than such pessimistic readings suggest (e.g., Allen, 2000). Similarly, numerous defences refer to Foucault’s emphasis on freedom, liberty, and resistance. From within the field of narrative therapy, Michael White expressed opposition to the view of Foucault as a ‘philosopher of despair’, and described, on the contrary, experiencing a ‘special joy’ when reading his work (2004, pp. 154–155). Clearly, White did not see the Foucauldian human being as a passive, docile figure. Others have argued that the pessimistic interpretations – even some of Foucault’s own statements – are either misreadings or over-simplifications of his writing, particularly when looked at in the context of his overall body of works (e.g., Gutting, 1994; Heller, 1996; Veyne, 2010). What do his critics make of his call, in the years before his death, for us to ‘create ourselves as a work of art’ (Foucault, 1997c, p. 262)?

But let us, as narrative practitioners, hesitate before positioning ourselves in this debate (and we will explore aspects of the sympathetic interpretations in due course). In my opinion it would be a mistake to dismiss too quickly the thrust of the pessimistic readings; especially the concern that human agency and resistance are not clearly formulated in Foucault’s works. There is something in this. And so I do not believe we should limit ourselves to thinking of Foucault’s critics as either right or wrong. There is a third possibility, and it is this which stands as my point of departure: they point us towards a problem that is yet to be resolved.

We do not have to agree with Foucault’s critics to note the importance of the challenge they lay down. And it is a challenge which is of profound relevance for the narrative practitioner. We have a question to answer: how are we to reconcile our Foucauldian constitutionalist perspective with our therapeutic vision of the person as imbued with personal agency, intentionality, and the capacity for resistance (e.g., White, 2007)? After all, characterizations of human beings as puppets, as ‘mechanically punched out’ effects of discourse, seem anathema to narrative therapy, replete as it is with optimistic accounts of the person. In our work, we orient to hearing stories of hope, of sparkling moments or unique outcomes, of preferred developments in people’s lives, and of the personal agency linked to people’s intentions, dreams, and values. Narrative therapy aims to assist in what White (2007) has referred to as the ‘transporting’ (p. 8) of persons towards hope, and aids in the generation of storied spaces – and, through these stories, personal and interpersonal spaces – through which life can be lived in preferred ways. As Freedman and Combs (1996) put it, we orient to ‘the construction of an “agentive self” ’ (p. 97). This is an optimistic, often solution-focused practice, following largely in the footsteps of that therapeutic optimist, Michael White.

So how do we reconcile the two stances we have given ourselves? How can the person exercise agency or resistance if he or she is a product of social discourses and power dynamics? And if not this, then who or what is the person?

Taking pessimism seriously

My goal here is not to try to guess what Foucault ‘really meant’. For Gutting (1994), it would be naïve to expect some singular, unified answer in any case. Rather, our task is to use some of his ideas to help us understand and orient to the people who consult with us. And in this respect, the more pessimistic reading has something important to tell us.

Every therapist recognizes that there are times in persons’ lives when a sense of agency, choice, freedom, and effective resistance seems absent, and when stuckness, paralysis, confusion, and powerlessness seem dominant. Almost every day we meet with people who experience aspects of their lives as hopelessly beyond their control. It is at these points that we might usefully think of the person as a product of social power dynamics; as a socially constituted subject. Such a formulation does not require a commitment to the view that this is all there is to the person. This, essentially, is the major criticism levelled at Foucault: his constituted subject is sometimes read as a total depiction of the person. It is clear that this was not Foucault’s position, or perhaps following Gutting (1994) we should rather say that it was not his only position. Indeed, his close friend Paul Veyne (2010) says Foucault was horrified to hear that his work had been read in this way. I will not take up this debate at this point, except to say that the docile account is not one I will support here. Nonetheless, I suggest that in just some ways, in relation to certain issues, and with respect to certain problem-saturated experiences, the persons who consult with us may have been, or are being, socially shaped into forms that are powerfully capturing, unwanted, and which seem beyond their control.

And so while we might read Foucault’s works in the joyful, optimistic ways that some of his apologists prefer – indeed, I will draw on certain interpretations of both Foucault and Nietzsche to try to justify a degree of optimism – I think it is significant that it is this same Foucault who can help us orient to and understand, not merely to overcome, the person’s capture in power; his or her constraint in problem-saturated experience and identity. So I propose to begin our journey by taking seriously the pessimistic notion of the human being as a socially produced, constituted figure, even while accepting that there is more to the human being than this. I will put aside, but only temporarily, the question of human agency.

Having set this ground, I think we can say, without becoming members of the critical chorus, that in many of his works, Foucault (e.g., 1977) presented a rather bleak picture of the human being. But instead of rationalizing this away, we can see it as one of his most underappreciated (and inadvertent) contributions to our own therapeutic practices. He gave us a powerful series of demonstrations that personal freedoms and preferred developments can be very hard to come by. It would be too strong to say that narrative practitioners deny the difficulty people experience in trying to find some sense of personal agency. But the person’s ineffectuality relative to the sometimes overwhelming nature of power, emphasized in Foucault’s earlier works, seems to have been occluded in the narrative works inspired by him. We therapists might well acknowledge, name, and externalize experiences of powerlessness, fixedness, or stuckness (c.f., White, 2007), but we tend not to examine them, either theoretically or in the therapeutic relationship. The dominant narrative therapeutic practices – externalizing, re-membering, re-authoring, unique outcome development, witnessing – are geared far more towards the promotion of personal movement than towards understanding and exploring, for example, why movement and change can be hard to achieve, why people become stuck within problem-saturated stories, how people become attached to the labels imposed on them, why they stay with pain when it hurts them so much, or how they contribute to each other’s and their own distress. These are not the aspects of human experience that we want to thicken, and so it is perhaps for this reason that there are no narrative therapeutic or conversational ‘maps’ of distress, emotional pain, or relationship breakdown.

So let us begin by looking at what the early Foucault showed us: the pessimism, despair, stuckness, paralysis, confinement, and control that people sometimes experience in their lives. And as we take seriously, and seek to better understand, the impact of the forces of social constitution on us and our identities, we will be better positioned to theorize and problematize – in a way that I believe is useful – the notion of personal agency, which has been so privileged in narrative practice. Our optimism is justified to the extent that we give it a cautious grounding: in power.

2

Power/Knowledge: The Social

In order to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Problem: Constitution versus Agency
• 2. Power/Knowledge: The Social
• 3. The Constituted Subject
• 4. A Constitutionalist Account of Resistance
• 5. Embodied Resistance
• 6. Narrative Empathy and the Resisting Figure
• 7. From the Resisting Figure to the Ethical Subject
• Glossary of Terms: Five Narrative Therapeutic Practices
• References
• Index