BOOK REVIEW
For Psychotherapy Australia
Narratives of Therapists' Lives
Michael White
Dulwich Centre Publications
Adelaide, South Australia, 1997
by
Brian Stagoll
Melbourne
In the past few years family therapy has moved to an increasing awareness of the
power of stories. This turn to narrative recognises the ways our lives and our stories are
intertwined, and proposes that as the stories that surround us and live within us are changed,
our lives can also change.
While narratives are at the heart of any psychotherapy, specific kinds of interventions
have been separated out to be defined as "Narrative Therapy", particularly in the work of
Michael White. Michael is described on the Net as the "guiding genius of Narrative Family
Therapy" and a new book by him is a noteworthy event.
Narrative Therapy has increasing momentum, with the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide
offering a hive of programs and workshops throughout Australia and overseas. The inaugural
International Conference in Adelaide in 1999 is reportedly nearly booked out, and floods of
enthusiasts are taking up these techniques.
Freud spoke of the development of psychoanalysis as a shift from a theory and set of
techniques, to a social movement and way of life. This can apply to any therapy as it grows
into a school, including Narrative Therapy. At a certain point the evolving movement turns
its attention to the lives of the practitioners. It is just this task that Michael White takes on in
this book, "the first time that the life of the therapist has been exclusively the focus of my
writing".
Michael's major concern here is with the extent experiences of demoralisation, fatigue
and exhaustion are so commonly expressed in the "dominant" culture of psychotherapy. He
sees widespread burnout, despair and therapist drop-out which he links to "the culture of
professional disciplines", a "mono culture" that disconnects therapists from the local and folk
knowledge that are parts of their personal history. A peculiar "loss of self" results for
professionals, a "dismemberment" that contributes significantly to "thin descriptions of
personal identity, and life generally". Vulnerability to despair and burnout are the result.
Michael offers the practices of Narrative Therapy as "partial antidotes" to this despair.
At the same time he attempts to sketch an ethical position for therapy, calling for
collaborative and decentred practices that are two-way and accountable, rather than one way
and autonomous. He invokes Foucauldian ideas that specify how the forms of knowledge of
the dominant expert culture of psychotherapy support forms of power that reproduce the
"structures of privilege" of mainstream culture. These forms of knowledge/power serve to
"marginalise persons who seek help, maintain hierarchies of knowledge, disqualify
alternative modes of life and thought, preserve the therapists' monopoly on power, and render
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invisible the therapist's location in the worlds of gender, culture, ethnicity, sexual preference,
class, etc.".
The way forward is to deconstruct and decentre "expert knowledge". To this end
Michael details an array of techniques, questions, rituals and ceremonies, illustrated with
stories, transcripts and testimonies. Particular emphasis is put on "re-membering
conversations". Such conversations offer opportunities to acknowledge directly the
contributions of (sometimes) forgotten others to a person's life, a "saying hello again", reengaging and revising the person's "club of life" by reactivating "dormant memberships".
This can result in a "restorying" towards richer, fuller and more accountable descriptions of
self. In supervision and training settings participation in these remembering conversations
by other therapists or students as reflecting teams or "outsider witnesses" is ritualised in
definitional ceremonies to authenticate and deepen the person's descriptions and "knowledge
performance", away from the dis-membering practices of the conventional psychotherapy
culture.
As I write, I am trying to convey something of the tone and rhythm of the language of
Narrative Therapy. The language is sufficiently different to pose a challenge. It is a whole
new vocabulary, about discourses in the constitution of lives, dominant problem-filled
narratives, alternative stories, and unique outcomes. Michael at one point indicates "that it is
not possible for me to express the ideas and processes of therapy that I wish to through
conventional ways of speaking and writing". He seems to be attempting a kind of transparent
deconstructive writing that moves beyond the "taken for granted terms of
psychotherapy/counselling". He hopes "readers find persevering with this complexity to be
rewarding". Such a project must be taken seriously. I wish I could say it resulted in the
greater transparency Michael is committed to. But often I was left puzzled or irritated.
And disappointed. I couldn't find what I was hoping for. I was pleased to be invited
to review this book. It was a chance to say "hello again" to somebody who I once worked
closely with. We met 20 years ago and I fondly remember Michael's energy and
inventiveness as we worked on building a journal in the early days of Australian Family
Therapy. We travelled together. He was a charismatic teacher and leader within the field. In
those days of pre-Foucauldian innocence, we shared a preoccupation with the effect on
people's lives of systems and institutions, (later translated as "the structures and discourses of
power"). We worried about the way therapy could often turn into part of the very problem it
had set out to deal with. I like to think we are still struggling with these same issues, but I
can see we've moved to very different spots over the years.
My problem with Michael's analysis is that he seems prone to the very things he
criticises. His description of psychotherapy in Australia is itself a thin and reduced one, a
blanket assertion presented without evidence, of a widespread and dominant model of
petrified one-way non-collaborative practice. I believe the culture of therapy is much more
various, contradictory and alive than the picture Michael paints. This magazine is but one
example of the richness of that culture. And for all Michael's emphasis on personal remembering, you would get the impression from this book that Narrative Therapy rose from
nowhere. There is virtually no connection of Whitean ideas about narrative to other therapy
traditions; nor any mention of any of the teachers or colleagues whom he may have
collaborated with along the way in shaping his ideas. (He does give credit to his clients.)
The story is just too one-way, with nothing given back, a practice Michael elsewhere
rightfully condemns. Certainly there are forms of bad therapy (and teaching) where
dogmatic professionals impose and control, and become disconnected and weary. This is
hardly a new phenomenon. But I just don't see the same monotonal oppressive culture of
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psychotherapy that Michael does, with its privileged yet burnt-out practitioners and despair,
complicities and blindness to gender and culture and class.
The greater number of therapists I know, across many models and schools, are decent
people, battling the odds, committed to social justice and balancing their sense of both the
limits and the power of their profession. To them the work is hard, at times impossible, but
not a cause for despair, rather the opposite. They are neither oppressors nor burnt-out cases.
Nor are the vast range of techniques and theories about psychotherapy in our culture so
bleakly and universally oppressive.
Narrative ideas have added to our store of useful things to help people move their
lives along a little. But this book attempts to go beyond spelling out useful techniques (many
of which have been written of before; for example, the undoubted power of re-membering
conversations surely has parallels with the family-of-origin methods advanced by Murray
Bowen).
Sadly, when this book is reaching out to ethical and political realms, it veers
perilously close to being a forgetting and a dismembering with its strident insistence on
severing Narrative Therapy from the culture of psychotherapy from which it arose. As can be
the case with Foucault, whose bewildering ideas can at first seem literally incredible, the
ideas in this book begin to lose their fizz when brought to earth by paraphrase or concrete
example. Both Foucault and White practise a psychological rhetorical overkill that can grab
your attention, but fades after a while. The repetitive phrasing and incantatory prose can be
hypnotic if you would just abandon yourself to it. But in the end it mystifies rather than
clarifies. Therapy is a messy business rather than a messianic one. Messianic explanations
are never very helpful in the long run of therapeutic work. The trick, à la Foucault, is how to
be against forms of domination without reintroducing the worst effects of empowering
practices. This is where this book fails. With its raising up and then splitting off a "Narrative
Therapy" from the multiple voices and stories of psychotherapy, I fear I can smell the incense
of a new Church, seeking converts not free-thinking therapists, and searching for salvation
not wisdom. It is this, not the culture of psychotherapy, that would lead me to despair.