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ABSTRACT: After locating postmodernism in its historical and epistemological contexts, this article takes the postmodern position that the behavioral theories that have informed clinical social work practice over the last century are stories with texts written by authors whose place in historical time, life experience, and personal proclivities shaped both the plots of the stories and the manner in which they were told. A review of the most influential theory-stories lays the groundwork for addressing two questions: What can postmodernism do for clinical social work? And what can clinical social work do for postmodernism?
KEY WORDS: postmodernism; narrative; social work theory; story.
Prior to the seventeenth century, people in premodern Europe believed that the truth was to be found in God's word. Contemplate long enough, don't question the natural order of things, and the truth would be revealed to you. With the 1700s, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution came the birth of the modern period. There occurred a shift from a belief in the supreme truth of God's word to a conviction that rational thought and systematic inquiry could uncover the truth. Reason, not revelation, was the path to knowledge, and the truth was something objective "out there" that could be discovered by carefully following the steps of the scientific method (Howe, 1994).
Following World War II, scholars from a variety of disciplines began to question the hegemony of the modern emphasis on reason and science and to suggest that no single rational system can define a universal truth. In swept the postmodern period, whose proponents asserted that no one truth will apply to all people and situations. Centered neither in revelation nor reason, truths were seen as de-centered and dispersed among the diversity of people, times, places, and cultures. Indeed, in this view truths were like stories whose meanings were embedded in and shaped by the language in which they were told. Unlike the modernists who sought to clear up any messy ambiguity that might get in the way of finding objective truth, postmodernists not only tolerated but embraced ambiguity, uncertainty, and contingency as valuable ways of knowing. Abjuring the dry methods of positivist science in understanding human affairs, they preferred the "pluralism and pastiche, playfulness and parody, process and performance" (Hove,...