The Person in Narrative Therapy: A Post-structural, Foucauldian Account

235 Pages·2014·1.35 MB·English

by  Michael Guilfoyle (auth.)

The Person in Narrative Therapy
Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology
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Titles include:
Michael Guilfoyle
THE PERSON IN NARRATIVE THERAPY
A Post-structural, Foucauldian Account
Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology
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The Person in Narrative
Therapy
A Post-structural, Foucauldian Account
Michael Guilfoyle
Psychology Department, Rhodes University, South Africa
palgrave
macmillan
© Michael Guilfoyle 2014
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 The Problem: Constitution versus Agency 8
2 Power/Knowledge: The Social 16
3 The Constituted Subject 45
4 A Constitutionalist Account of Resistance 78
5 Embodied Resistance 105
6 Narrative Empathy and the Resisting Figure 133
7 From the Resisting Figure to the Ethical Subject 167
Glossary of Terms: Five Narrative Therapeutic Practices 212
References 214
Index 222
v
Acknowledgements
To my wife and best friend, Trudy Meehan, one of the smartest people
I know. Thank you for not agreeing with me on so many occasions, for
pushing me to rethink and to be clearer, and for always believing that
I had something important to say. I am inspired by your ability to model
resistance and agency in the face of a world that’s not always kind, and
not always fair. For what it’s worth, this is for you.
I am also very grateful to Ed, Sydney, and Blue, for loving me, and
for nudging me away from the computer every now and then. My mom
and dad, two of the most ethical human beings I know, as well as Kelly,
Richard, Andrew, and Shanna.
Thank you to my colleagues all around the world. There are three
groups to whom I am particularly grateful for giving me space to share
my narrative practice experiences, and for sharing their own experiences
with me in turn. My peer supervision group in Dublin, Ireland: Paul
Kelly, Paidraic Gibson, and Tony Horgan. The Dublin narrative ther-
apy group: Therese Hegarty, Paul Heslin, Marie Keenen, Ann Campbell,
Nora Sweetman, Trish Tyrrell, Margaruete Kirwan, Keith Oulton, and all
those others I met along the way. And then the Grahamstown Narra-
tive Therapy Network: Jan Knoetze, Lisl Foss, Ilse Appelt, Kim Barker,
Linda Schwartz, Trudy Meehan, Zimbini Ogle, Lucia Oosthuysen, and
Lindsay Smaill. Emerging from that group, Lisl and I had many stim-
ulating conversations about the strengths and limitations of narrative
practice. Thank you, Lisl, for standing alongside me as I jumped from
my safe perch. You helped me to teach, practise, and in some ways even
live more openly and honestly. I am so pleased to have friends in you,
Richard, and Torey, who nurture us with meals and conversation when
we most need it.
Special mention must go to Judy Rankin, Ruby Patel, and Floss
Mitchell, for always treating me like a human being.
I have learned much from the students with whom I have worked
over the years, and who stretched me across some kind of zone of prox-
imal development, at both Trinity College Dublin (Ireland) and Rhodes
University (South Africa). I would like to make special mention of the
2012 M1 students of the Counselling Psychology Master’s programme
at Rhodes University: Kirsten Farquharson, Donna Mitchell, Thobeka
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Msengana, Jeremy Ruiters, Lindsay Smaill, and Beverly Texeira. You
pushed me to think through my ideas more clearly, and always to make
them relevant to the people with whom we work. It is with you, dur-
ing our Tuesday conversations, that many of these ideas began to come
to life.
I tip my hat to Tim Barry, Kevin Durrheim, Graham Lindegger, Doug
Wassenaar, Anthony Pillay, David Ingleby, and Len Holdstock: my intel-
lectual stimulants. We haven’t always kept in touch, but over the years
you have inspired me, believed in me, and pushed my thinking to places
I never thought it could go.
I am grateful to Rhodes University, for giving me the time and space
needed to complete this book, to series editor Jack Martin, for offer-
ing very useful suggestions regarding what I needed to clarify, and to
Nicola Jones, editor, for guiding me through the publishing process with
kindness, wisdom, and patience.
And then, to the people with whom I have worked over the last 24
years. None of the stories I tell are about you, and yet your mark on my
thinking pervades the book. Your stories of pain, trauma, misery, hope,
celebration, connection, humility, courage, determination, and resolve
have touched my life in ways I cannot easily put into words. You have
shownme a million ways in which ethics, values, and commitments can
be brought to life. In my eyes you have contributed to an enrichment
of the world, and inspired not only my thought but also my ways of
being. Thank you for making therapy such a wonderful lifetime journey
for me.
This work is based upon research supported by the National Research
Foundation (NRF, South Africa). Any opinions, findings, and conclu-
sions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the
author, and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability in regard
thereto.
Introduction
On the face of it, this is a book about theory. But it is also a book about
practice. My aim is to use theory to show that narrative practice can
embrace a range of voices, styles, and ethics. This grand ambition flows
from my initial and far more personal goal to situate myself as a practi-
tioner; not as a facsimiled, degraded version of Michael White – genius
though he undoubtedly was – but as a post-structurally oriented nar-
rative practitioner with my own unique voice, style, ethos, and even
ethics. This book is part of my attempt to find myself in this way.
My frustration at my own difficulties in working as a narrative ther-
apist has its own particular history. I trained as a clinical psychologist
in the late 1980s, during which time I was exposed to the exciting ideas
of such figures as Minuchin, Whitaker, Bateson, Erickson, and the mem-
bers of the Milan School. Then, in the early 1990s, following a trajectory
that is probably shared by many others in the narrative therapy world,
I – in partnership with and inspired by my gifted friend, Tim Barry –
encountered social constructionist and narrative ideas. I excitedly read
the works of such authors as Tom Andersen, Kenneth Gergen, Sheila
McNamee, Lynn Hoffman, and, of course, Michael White and David
Epston. This led me to seek out further training in narrative therapy and
in the supervision of narrative practices, as I simultaneously tried in dif-
ferent settings to teach these ideas to students as well as to put them
into practice.
But I always experienced a sense of unease, which I could only really
begin to articulate in the mid-2000s: after over a decade of consider-
ing myself a narrative therapist, I still couldn’t quite do it the way that
White or Epston seemed to. A colleague of mine told me that he went
into narrative therapy training because he ‘wanted to be able to do what
Michael and David did’. But I could never do what they did. My clients
1
2 The Person in Narrative Therapy
just weren’t responding the right way! Was I doing it wrong? While I felt
that my work was reasonably effective, more often than not it seemed
that client change was linked with something other than my narrative
‘moves’; the nature of the relationship, for example, seemed far more
influential.
What confused the matter further was the insistence of narrative
therapy figures – colleagues, workshop facilitators, journal editors, and
reviewers – that narrative therapy was not about ‘technique’, but a way
of thinking, and a way of being with a client. Hearing such characteriza-
tions, I concluded that I must indeed be doing it wrong, thinking about
it incorrectly, or even ‘being’ wrong. The trouble was not that I disagreed
with the intentions of these characterizations. Quite the reverse, in fact:
I agreed that a focus on ‘technique’ could be sterile, and I took the rela-
tionship with the client very seriously indeed. And, yet, I still couldn’t
get the hang of certain practices, especially ‘externalizing the problem’,
which I found trickiest of all. I had to tell myself – and my students –
‘externalizing is not a technique, but a way of thinking’. But such asser-
tions weren’t terribly convincing, and I felt I was forcing myself (and
my students) to accept a principle upon which so many insisted, but
which seemed incongruent with my own experience. My experience was
telling me that narrative therapy was an awful lot about technique.
Consider, for example, that probably the most currently influential
narrative therapy text (White’s [2007] Maps of Narrative Practice) is struc-
tured around – and provides a structure for – seven ‘maps’ for hosting
and guiding conversations. Is there really any significant difference
between ‘maps’ and ‘techniques’? White says there is, but I’m not so
sure. In each case one has pre-constructed procedures or steps to follow
that move the client from point A to B. It is true that many of these
maps have proven useful in my own practice. But occasionally I feel, as
I move into one or other conversational map, that I am stepping onto
a pathway that has already been laid out. It is not mine, nor is it my
client’s: it is, to be frank, Michael White’s. It is indeed a beautiful, excit-
ing, and productive pathway. But I am always aware that someone else
has already levelled the ground and cleared away the bushes and thorns;
even put their own signposts on it. This takes away just a fraction of the
sheen of the pathway, at least for me. This matters when, sometimes,
I get knocked out of the immediacy of my relationship with the client,
as I become aware of what lurks around the next corner: a question
about hopes and dreams, perhaps? What will she say when we get to
the part where we discuss values and commitments? And then some-
times it feels as though the client is going along the ‘mapped’ pathway