Issue highlights narrative therapy – Worldys News

Recently published by Maraya Publishing House, the book “Narrative Therapy: From Understanding to Application” was published. Through it, its authors, Chakir Filala and Widad Saeed, attempted to shed light on a set of ideas around which this therapeutic method revolves, in order to understand how narrative therapy treats people from their suffering with transient or chronic psychological distress; by relying on the stories they tell about their problems in a narrative format.

According to data on the publication, these problems carry with them normative facts that these people adopt in the context of social interaction, within the framework of the usual institutional construction of facts in reality; which restricts them and limits their flexibility of action, and makes them prisoners of problems that are in fact outside of themselves and are pre-constructed from the system of language and its uses and the system of power and discourse; since these systems frame their narration of the stories of their problems, and thus form their narrative identity that determines their perspective of themselves and others.

The book summary stated that this treatment relies on a set of ideas and concepts, based on the theoretical propositions and philosophical ideas of the theory of social culture, social constructivism, and postmodernism. These intellectual foundations, frames of reference, and their conceptual investment shaped and formulated the method of narrative therapy, shaped its perspective on psychological suffering, and determined its dealing with problems through the application of the principle of cooperation between the therapist and the person suffering. Based on these theoretical ideas, narrative therapy came to believe in the role of social interaction and language in constructing knowledge and reality, as a product of social interaction.

Narrative therapy, according to the same summary, considers that these given structures of knowledge and reality, formed through the system of power, discourse and language, restrict self-identity, determine and control the behavior of the other; therefore, their effects are considered foundational in shaping facts. Therefore, within the framework of the conceptual investment of the aforementioned philosophies, we find that it has invested in the concept of difference, the implicitly present absent, the concept of deconstruction, the concept of becoming, possibilities and the multiplicity that constitute the self, narrative identity and its reshaping.

This understanding of the intellectual premises and the conceptual investment of the set of philosophical ideas and therapeutic methods led the authors of the book to review and expound some applied models using some scenes and maps; such as the exception map, then the problem graduation map known as the position statement map, and the map of deconstructing the prevailing story and identity conclusions. They also provided an example of working with the map of identifying “the absent and the implicitly present” in the narrated story, and the map of the external witness and the relational scene, which involves witnesses (present or absent) in the prevailing and alternative story. Finally, using the map of values ​​and intentions and opening up the area of ​​the possible, through the scene of values ​​and intentions (the relationship of the self to the self).