Introduction

Interest in the study of narratives, and the process by which meaning is “created” through shared discourse has gradually filtered from the humanities and social sciences into the disciplinary domains of both psychoanalysis and clinical social work. The analysis of narrative discourse is found in such disparate fields of inquiry as cultural anthropology, psychology, , philosophy (Ricoeur, 1981), history (White, 1973), ethics (McIntyre, 1984), literature (Booth, 1979), and linguistics. In sociolinguistic terms, narratives are organized units of discourse whose essential internal function consists of the recounting of a story (Hoshmand, 1993). Narration enables the narrator to capture past experience or construct present or future experience and as such, involves a temporal sequence (Labov & Waletzky, 1967). Narratives can be described as “natural cognitive and linguistic forms through which individuals attempt to order, organize, and express meaning” (Mishler, 1986, p. 106). Though there may not be complete consensus on how narrative ought be defined, there is fundamental agreement that narratives should organize events so that “a sense of coherence as well as a sense of direction or movement over time” (Borden, 1992, p. 136) is clearly demonstrated.

Clinical social work, psychology, and other human sciences appear to be in a transitional period in which basic assumptions about what constitutes science and scientific inquiry are being challenged. The positivistic worldview, which has exerted a powerful and pervasive influence on modern scientific thought, has also imposed significant constraints on the nature of research within the clinical professions (Howard, 1985; Mahoney, 1991; Polkinghorne, , ; Neimeyer & Neimeyer, 1993). As theorists have become increasingly aware of such restrictions, efforts to cultivate and distill methods of investigation derived from other disciplines that are