Story re-visions: narrative therapy in the postmodern world

Abstract

Stories of the Self: Surviving In a World With No Truth Story Revisions: Narrative Therapy in the Postmodern World A. Parry and R.E. Doan. New York: The Guilford Press, 1994, 216 pp., $15.95 (softcover). Postmodern writings, the most part have earned reputations thick, impenetrable, overly intellectualized styles which belie most mortal Attempts at understandings. The standard postmodern sentence, it seems, contains less than six dependent clauses and encompasses at least one full page text. Rife with nonoffensi ve language, neologisms and round-about sentence constructions, such writings have alienated a large majority of readers who have been raised on modernist, straightforward svelte and words which arc actually included m Webster's New World Dictionary (Guralnik, 1982) And rightfully so. Thankfully, Parry and Doan have largely forgone such convoluted writing us their book. In actuality, this is two books under one corer. The first part, written largely by Alan Parry, focuses on the literary and epistemological precedents therapy. In this section, Parry points to the fundamental differences between paradigmatic-modernist therapy and narrative postmodern therapy, suggesting that the chief goal of modernist therapy and, thus, language is to reduce, to limit one word to one clear, strictly operartionally defined meaning. On the other fund, the central goal of postmodernist therapy and language is to elaborate, to allow a word more than one possible met, to invite the client to use words as he or she interprets them. In the first chapter of this book, Parry succinctly outlines the heart of what he sees as the big problem of modernist thinking in a postmodern world-all of our stories, our narratives have been invalidated and rendered impotent. Parry asserts that as science, truth and progress supplanted sacred and mythical as the operative narratives in the modern age, we had choice but to begin comparing our own personal against those meta-stories. However, as the world developed and became more complex, even these became insufficient to explain the tangled intricacy of events surrounding us. Thus, as the more cynical populace of the world moved into the postmodern era, we were left with no single story, however understood, [which was] able to provide either legitimacy or sufficiency equal to the pace of change (p. 11) Therefore, Parr, advocates an adaptation of therapeutic technique to the postmodern world, where the ideals and certainties of the modernist search truth have given way to a more individual search meaning. In Chapter 2, Parry turns his discussion to the challenges of doing story-based therapy in a world which has largely been stripped of its grand Parry uses the theme of family therapy, which he suggests is for postmodernism what psychoanalysis was modernism (p. 5), presumably because it exemplifies the demonic interplay of different stories within a system, none of which can be assumed to have superiority over any other. He asserts that, even within an individual, there are many influencing the person at any one time, in the same way that there are many and voices within a family system. Paraphrasing Maturana, Parry indicates that: since there are metapositions anywhere in the universe, all we can know are systems in a never-ending process of perturbing and coupling with one another to form new systems. Furthermore, we can only know what our own biological structures permit us to know. But since it is our structurally determined capacity language that even enables us to make such distinctions as systems in the first place, all our perceived truths are, in the very first instance, constructed Truths, (p. 16) By endorsing this perspective, Parry situates therapy in a broadly constructivist (see Kelly, 1955). Parry goes on to suggest that, Whether the viewer is a person, a family, a community, or a people, the world is unavoidable viewed through the lens of a succession of stories-not only 3 personal story, but gender, community, class, and cultural (p. …