Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

3.5 Narratives in psychotherapy
In psychotherapy, metaphors are best understood within the larger framework of a
narrative. As defined in chapter 3.3.1 a narrative is a specific way of constructing or
configuring episodes of life or literature into an effective and convincing whole, such
as a story or biography. The basic idea goes back to Aristotle’s theory of the tragedy
and his concept of mimesis: art imitates reality. During the last twenty years various
narrative theories have been developed within psychology and psychotherapy, and a
major multidisciplinary discipline has been formed around them, as demonstrated in
many books on narrative psychology and verbal psychotherapy (Polkinghorne 1988).
Spence coined a distinction between ‘narrative truth’ and ‘historical truth’,
underlining that the effectiveness of narrative truth is linked to its persuasiveness
more than to its (objective) truth. “A well-constructed story possesses a kind of
narrative truth that is real and immediate and carries an important significance for the
process of therapeutic change” (Spence 1982, quoted in Polkinghorne 1988, p. 178).
Schafer (1983) pioneered the idea that the narrative revision or transformation of the
client’s more or less incoherent life story into a more coherent and supportive
narrative was at the core of psychotherapy, and that narrative activity enables the
client to be the subject of the process instead of the object of an expert offering
interpretations.
Polkinghorne (1988) sees the construction of a meaningful human existence as the
common thread between psychotherapy and narrative theory. “When they come to the
therapeutic situation, clients already have life narratives, of which they are both the
protagonist and author. (…) The past cannot be changed (…) however; the
interpretation and significance of [past] events can change if a different plot is used to
configure them. Recent events may be such that the person’s plotline cannot be
adapted to include them. The life plot must then itself be altered or replaced.” (p.182)
Therapists assist clients in reconstructing their life narratives, helping them to
articulate and bring awareness to the narratives they have developed, discussing the
plots, meaning and appropriateness of these narratives, and exploring alternative plots
and narratives.
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