The Person In Narrative Therapy

Who is the person in narrative therapy? In this book, Michael Guilfoyle notes that narrative practice does not have a coherent formulation of personhood in the way one finds in other fields, such as psychoanalysis and cognitive-behavioural therapy. The book critically examines the post-structural principles that underpin narrative practice, which make available powerful conceptual tools for theorizing the person.

But there are significant tensions to be resolved: How can the person be endowed with personal agency, as narrative therapists claim, while simultaneously being seen as a 'product of power', as Foucault famously argued? Exactly what is the person's relationship to power, and on what condition can he or she resist?

Using several detailed case examples, the book discusses the ideas of White, Epston, Foucault, Nietzsche, and others, to tease out the threads of these questions, and opens up new avenues for narrative practice and thought. Review: Theorizing of this sort has gone underground for some time since White and Epston (1990) and White's publications in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

This came to an abrupt end with Michael's death in 2008, soon after his far more practical 'Maps of Narrative Practice'(2007) was published. Guilfoyle has chosen to intellectually and clinically wrestle with matters that have been at the very heart of narrative therapy theory and practice from its beginnings in the mid-1980s.

They are by no means settled nor is it very likely they ever will be. As one of the originators of narrative therapy, I am very grateful to Guilfoyle for renewing the problematizing of power and other concerns that 'frame' what a narrative therapist does. - David Epston, co-author of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends and Experience, Contradiction, Narrative and Imagination