Subjectivity in Narrative Psychotherapy
[Subjectivity in Psychotherapy, 01]
This is the first installment of a series in which I explore the assumptions (explicit and implicit) in various approaches to psychotherapy. In this paper, we will be looking at how subjectivity (the subjective experience) is represented in narrative psychotherapy. There are a few strands of this relatively new therapeutic approach; we will be confining ourselves mostly to the work of Michael White and David Epston.
Let’s think about what we mean by subjectivity for a moment. Why not use a more approachable term; for instance, “self” or “personality”? This terminology, reminiscent of the Enlightenment, is often use in mainstream psychology. However, it carries with it certain assumptions that might limit our interrogation of the “human/subjective experience”. Subject on the contrary refers to a much more open-ended question about our experience as experiencing things, i.e., how we experience ourselves in the world. It is a term rooted in attempts to move away from thinking about personhood as an atomized thing existing on its own, simply bumping into other ‘personhoods’ along its way. Subject, and this is particularly important for narrative psychotherapy, is deeply rooted in social, symbolic, and linguistic structures.
Narrative Psychotherapy
Let’s begin with a brief introduction to narrative psychotherapy: its origins and its expression in the work of Michael White and David Epston.
Narrative therapy comes in a few flavors. It is perhaps helpful to conceptualize it under the broader family tree of therapeutic approaches known as post-modern (Sharf, 2012) or under language-based approaches (Avdi & Georgaca, 2009). These approaches are generally known for adopting the theoretical flavors of social constructionist, de-constructionist, structuralist, and post-structuralist ways of thinking.
Michael White, in his Maps of Narrative Practice (2010), claims that people suffer when they conflate social or otherwise external narratives as personal identity, and “[w]hen this is the case, their efforts to resolve problems usually have the effect of exacerbating them instead” (p. 24). Here we have the theory of subjectivity contained in narrative psychotherapy: we are the accumulation of external narratives and stories we keep reproducing in internalized form. From the work of Foucault, White finds the origin of this distinctly modern form of suffering in three socio-cultural practices dating from the 17th century onward:
- The invention and social implementation (both material and ideological) of certain classes of people (e.g., homeless, mentally ill, etc.).
- The implementation of biopolitics: the practice of classifying disorders of the body, always with an implicit form of normative “health”.
- “Normalizing judgement” which incites us to always refer ourselves and others to certain professionally standardized norms of developmental of personal achievement.
These social norms become internalized over time and create a rigid self-image. We then use this self-image to navigate the world and relate to others and ourselves. For example: White (2010, pp. 10–23) gives his famous case study of when it became clear to him what was happening in many of the patients he treated. A young boy was referred to him by his mother for not being able to sit still in class, getting too distracted, and a difficulty in engaging meaningfully with his classmates and friends. The young boy was diagnosed with ADHD. White realized that he would make no progress if he engaged with the boy only on account of his diagnosis. Rather, he began to seek how ADHD was interrupting the boy’s life. As his axiom goes: the problem became the problem, not the person. White realized that the diagnosis was a separate entity that was internalized by the young boy (and his parents), and this identity had become rigid and resistant to change. How does one transgress or change who one is? It seemed to be more beneficial to transgress something that was ‘out there’, i.e., the ADHD diagnosis. In fact, one gleams from the literature that there is a certain impulse of resistance to social narratives in general.
Already, then, we have a picture of what it means to experience oneself: a socially and historically structured sense of self always in reference to some ‘Other’ (a being or entity we are always living in reference to).
As a political project, narrative therapy was certainly born, in part, as an attempt to de-objectify people. That is, it assumes the Foucauldian project in clinical practice. The goal of the psychotherapy is to re-author one’s narrative through a variety of means, including salvaging or elevating heretofore neglected alternative narratives.
Meaning and language
A basic assumption of narrative ways of thinking, as we touched upon above, is the primacy of language when thinking about how we make meaning of our lives and the world we inhabit (Crossley, 2000; White & Epston, 1990). In other words, subject is a construct (hence, ‘social constructivism’). Particularly for Foucault, the constitutive element of language in the subject are “discourses of truth and knowledge from which are derived our models of normal and abnormal behavior” (Mansfield, 2000, p. 52).
History and genealogy
The subject is constituted through and in historical, social, and symbolic practices. It does not stand outside of history, nor is it exempt from its vicissitudes. But we are not looking at the History of the Enlightenment (nor, even of modernity), but of genealogy: we are looking to do a “critical ontology of ourselves” (Besley, 2002, p. 135). We are looking at how the multitude of voices and narratives are either privileged or repressed, and how knowledge — and its corresponding reality — is thus constituted through the ‘dominant’ narrative. The history of narrative therapy is thus antithetical to totality: there is no one unity or correct way of looking at subject’s constitution. Once we make this move, we realize that history is always open, still yet to be closed by some decisive, a-historical act. Following Jerome Bruner’s psycho-literary theories, this openness is referred to by White as the “relative indeterminacy” of a text that must be continually performed when authoring and re-authoring our lives (White & Epston, 1990, pp. 12–13) via the acts of living and storytelling.
Although our personal histories are always open to revision and re-authoring, how we make sense of our lives is always linear: one event, preceding from another, leads eventually to another event: a → b → c (White & Epston, 1990). This is not necessarily literally true, but it is necessarily phenomenologically true in order for us to make sense of our life story, or personal narrative.
The openness inherent in how the narrative subject is constituted allows us to change it. We can re-member, re-authorize, and re-engage with our personal histories in order to create a more positive, life-affirming, and helpful narrative of ourselves (White, 2010). What this opens up, however, is a question: Who does the re-authoring? Who has internalized the external stories if there is no “self”? If everything is pure language and social structure, what entity does the interrogation of its own history? The concept of reflexivity may guide us through this impasse.
Reflexivity
Michele Crossley (2000) offers us two ways of thinking about reflexivity. First, that of “self-control”. Here, subject can detach itself from its immediate (and mediated) experience, reflect on what its conditions are, and direct itself a propos its agency. This is clearly a remnant of Enlightenment thinking (and its force is still felt on our criminal, legal, political, and commonsense institutions). Second, that of “self-exploration”. In self-exploration, subject must recognize that it is deeply and irretrievably permeated by the symbolic. Thus, the very tools it uses for reflection are also symbolic. Agency, for narrative psychology, lies in this realm: in exploring how one is always already externally constituted. This is the paradoxical inwardness of the narrative subject. A nice quote from Crossley (2000, p. 21):
[Narrative psychology is] an attempt to study the language, stories and narratives which constitute selves and the implication and permutations of those narratives for individuals and society. The experience of self takes on meaning only through specific linguistic, historical and social structures.
This is how White, Epston, and other narrative psychotherapists engage in a mutual re-creation of subject through analysis of narratives. The goal is to examine which narratives have been at play at which moments in the subject’s life — the dominant as well as repressed narratives — in hopes of engendering a revolutionary subject. The philosophical birthplace of this, of course, is to be found in Foucault, particularly his later work and his “return” to Kant’s self-critical consciousness most elegantly represented in his 1984 essay, “What is Enlightenment?” White similarly finds agency in “a sense of being able to regulate one’s own life, to intervene in one’s life to affect its course according to one’s inventions, and to do this in ways that are shaped by one’s knowledge of life and skills of living” (2010, p. 264).
It is White and Epston’s (1990) belief that stories and narratives are always necessarily reductive, limiting subject’s understanding of its own rich experience. There are always gaps in the narratives which constitute subjectivity, leaving room for revision, resistance (to dominant narratives), and inclusion of those narratives which have been left out — the latter of which they refer to as “unique outcomes”.
Thanks for reading the first installment of the series “Subjectivity in Psychotherapy”. Our project here is to interrogate the assumptions (implicit and explicit) made in different clinical approaches to psychotherapy about the human experience, or “subjectivity”.
Avdi, E. & Georgaca, E. (2009). “Narrative and discursive approaches to the analysis subjectivity in psychotherapy.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 3(5).
Besley, A. C. (2002). “Foucault and turn to narrative psychotherapy”. British Journal of Guidance and Counseling, 30(2).
Crossley, M. L. (2000). Introducing Narrative Psychology: Self, Trauma, and the Construction of Meaning. Philidelphia, PA: Open University Press.
Foucault, M. (1984). “What is Enlightenment?” In P. Rabinow (ed.) Foucault Reader.
Mansfield, N. (2000). Subjectivity: Theories of Self from Freud to Haraway. Kindle.
Sharf, R. S. (2012). Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy (4th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
White, M. (2010). Maps of Narrative Practice. Kindle.
White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York, NY: Norton.
