Book Review: Narrative Therapy

Narrative Therapy: the social construction of preferred realities, by Jill Freedman & Gene Combs. 1996 W. W. Norton & Company, London. 305 pp, hb.

'Our prevailing narratives provide the vocabulary that sets our realities, our destinies are opened or closed in terms of the stories that we construct to understand our experience.' This quote by the noted social psychologist, Harry Goolishian, captures the central theme of Freedman and Combs' text which attempts to be a primer on what has, with increasing frequency, come to be labelled in North America as 'narrative therapy'.

The book's ten chapters focus on both the historical and philosophical ideas which underpin this approach to therapy (Chapters 1 and 2) and issues surrounding its applications and practice (Chapters 3 to 10). I have to say that while I found the first 50-odd pages (Chapters 1,2 and part of 3) to be worth careful reading, the remaining chapters - which make use of a great deal of transcript material - were highly repetitive, usually uninteresting and in desperate need of ruthless editing. Perhaps most useful of all was the extensive bibliography provided since many of the ideas presented throughout the book are (clearly acknowledged) summaries derived from the writings of authors such as Michael White, Kenneth Gergen and the aforementioned Harry Goolishian all of whom deserve to be read far more attentively by members of this Society.

Even so, and in spite of the book's many faults, there remains sufficient 'gold' in the text to make the act of sifting through its many pages worthwhile - particularly to readers of the Journal. For one thing, it provides an exceedingly clear and well referenced account of the major strands of thought that have come to be labelled as social constructionism and 'post-modernism' in North America. What is most relevant to us about such views is their links with current thinking regarding existential-phenomenology as presented by the various authors closely associated with this Society. While Freedman and Combs appear not to have the slightest knowledge of what might be called 'The British turn' on contemporary existential thought and therapeutic practice, just about every one of their principal conclusions (on topics and issues such as inter versus intra psychism, the self, and the inescapability of interpretation) will seem familiar to many readers. In similar fashion, the authors' major concerns with regard to therapeutic practice - deconstructive listening, not-knowing and explicatory questioning - resonate with views expressed by many contributors to this Journal.

So why bother to read about something that you already know about? Well, for one thing, nothing is ever exactly the same as anything else and the route that the two authors take their readers through in order to arrive at their conclusions is one less likely to have been travelled by European readers. In similar fashion, if the various 'rumblings' coming from North America regarding the growing attractiveness of 'narrative therapy' over more established approaches prove to be correct, the reading of this text will help readers to understand and clarify what is being proposed and debated and how such discourse impacts upon a variety of developments in the UK and Europe as a whole.

There is undoubtedly a much better book on 'narrative therapy' waiting to be written (or reviewed). This text succeeds in tantalising us with its unrealised potential.

Ernesto Spinelli