Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities

Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, by Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, W. W. Norton, 1996, 305 ps.

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;...