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The authors of Narrative Therapy show a worthy humility. They note that their own depiction of what has come to be called “narrative therapy” is one of many. They express their indebtedness to Michael White and David Epston whose contribution to poststructuralist family therapy theory underlay the premises of the current work: the reauthoring of lives, the multiplicity of realities, the transformative value of the performance in life of new stories, and the constitutive power of language.
Freedman and Combs are avowedly nonessentialist. They usefully embed their view of therapy within the metaphors of narrative—people's lives can be regarded as stories that can be reauthored to good therapeutic purpose—and of social construction, that is, how people's lives are storied are largely a function of personal interactions within a matrix of social and cultural influences. All words are inherently interpretive; the function of the questions the therapist asks is not to gain information but to generate experience. The authors dispatch the prior “systems” metaphor so prominent in family therapy: systems approaches invite a manipulative kind of intervention and falsely insinuate an objectivity that is unjustified.
The narrative therapy that Freedman and Combs propose is postmodern and hermeneutic. They seek the construction and reconstruction of meaning, the codes of interpretation, and the patient-therapist's coauthoring of new “texts” that more adaptively and more ambiguously stipulate what our patients' lives are about. Always, they say, there is more to a person's life than what has been storied. Inevitably, it is the culturally authorized stories as played out in the microcosm of the individual that our patients present to us. We need to appreciate that what is culturally authorized is largely a function of Foucauldian discourse power dynamics. Those in power provide the lexicon from which stories are constructed. Naturally, the lexicon is likely to spin stories in certain