#interpretive turn

[narrativetherapy-blog]

Poststructuralism and the politics of interpretation in narrative therapy

Poststructuralism includes the assumption that since we are all part of culture we can all be caught up by discourses, and therapists can undoubtedly reproduce these discourses in the therapy room without even recognizing it. For poststructuralists, no one is in a position to be an objective expert on someone else’s experience. Furthermore, as members of a culture we recognize that power influences the political context of people’s lives both in and out of the therapy room. This leads narrative therapists to work to expose discourses and power differentials that support problems and to work from a position of collaboration, recognizing clients as the privileged authors of their own stories. We believe that this dedication to exposing taken-for-granted power relationships supports narrative therapists in pursuing social justice.

Recognizing clients as the privileged authors of their own stories reflects a movement in the social sciences known as “the interpretive turn.” The interpretive turn is a shift in who is doing the interpreting. Specifically, it refers to a shift away from experts making interpretations about other people’s lives and toward people making interpretations and meaning of their own lives. This shift favors local, personal, contextualized knowledge rather than universal, generalized expert knowledge. Although recognizing people as the privileged authors of their own stories does not completely change the power relations in the therapy room, it does encourage us to find ways of collaborating rather than imposing our interpretations.

Gene Combs & Jill Freedman, “Narrative, Poststructuralism, and Social Justice: Current practices in narrative therapy” inThe Counseling Psychologist, 40(7),October, 2012 pp 1036 - 1037.

[shrinkrants]

When we use the narrative metaphor and the lens of poststructuralism to orient our work as therapists, we cultivate an intense curiosity about each new couple we meet. We cherish each couple’s stories. We work with the partners in couples to invite them to celebrate their differences and to develop and live out narratives that they prefer around the particularities of their lives. This valuing of the meaning people make of their own experience over the meaning experts make of that experience has been referred to as the “interpretive turn”. It leads us to de-center our meanings and to conduct ourselves not as experts, but as interested collaborators—perhaps with an anthropological or biographical or field researcher’s bent—who are skilled at asking questions to bring forth the knowledge and experience that is carried in the particular stories of the couples we work with. We work to help people notice the influence of restrictive cultural stories in their lives and to expand and enrich their own life narratives. We strive to find ways to spread the news of triumphs; to circulate stories of accomplishment, fulfillment, and meaningful struggle in order to keep them alive and growing. We believe that these alternative stories of non-standard lives in turn contribute to keeping our culture growing and flowing.

Jill Freedman & Gene Combs (2009). Narrative Couple Therapy. In A. Gurman & N. Jacobson (eds.)Clinical Handbook of Couple Therapy (revised edition). New York: Guilford.