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With all this talk on Narrative Therapy, let me refer you to Andrew
Lock's work on this topic.
It will introduce and summarize White's theories in a way you may well
find useful. It will also put a face on them, as Lock begins his
summary with a photograph of Michael White.
Click here
to go to Lock's website on White.
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Karl
Tomm has done a lot to popularize
Michael
White's and David's
Epston's version of Narrative Therapy. Tomm told us of his story
of inspiration with Narrative Therapy when he wrote the foreword for White
and Epston's key text, Narrative
Means to Therapeutic Ends. In that foreword, Tomm said
| Since encountering their work three years ago, my own therapeutic methods have changed enormously. Because of the new trail they have broken, I have been able to enter into some entirely new domains of practice. Needless to say, this has been extremely gratifying both profesionally and personally. Many of my friends and colleagues are having similar experiences. |
What was so inspiring to Tomm? I think he explained that best
in a frequently cited, but not very available paper that he gave before
a conference in 1989 - the year before Narrative
Means to Therapeutic Ends was published.
This paper previewed Narrative Therapy philosophy and helped to launch
this new movement within family therapy. (You
can see my paraphrase of this paper here). Basically, it seemed
to Tomm, that Narrative Therapy could use language to eradicate the problem,
almost to "exorcise" it, and it would leave clients less likely to need
to defend themselves and blame others. Blame would be cast, it seemed
to him at that time, on abstract externalized entities.
In these words in 1989 and 1990, Tomm seems completely taken by Narrative
Therapy.
By 1993, we begin to see a little shift in his writing. He is still very inspired by White and the Narrative model of therapy, but he is now more openly eclectic and he distinguishes his own approach from that of Michael White's in several ways.
By 1993, after a few years working within the Narrative Therapy
paradigm, Tomm is reporting on his differences with some aspects of White's
approach to therapy. Tomm notices that Narrative Therapy seems
too monologic.
The new preferred story that the client takes from Narrative Therapy (as
she reauthors her life), feels a bit too pat, too removed the client's
lived experience for Tomm. He wants to hear more what has happened and
make the new, preferred story less important in the therapy conversation.
Talking about his own form of therapy, and distinguishing it from White's,
Tomm says:
| I focus on enabling persons to bring forth coherent descriptions of experience that have theapeutic potential. ...Perhaps one difference between us lies in my tendency to place more emphasis on lived experience than on stories about that experience. |
He seems less inspired with the central idea of Narrative Therapy, the
creation of a re-authored monologic
narrative, and has become more interested in the dialogic
nature
of "our stories." Comparing his own work with White's, he says that
he, Tomm, is
| less invested in the narrative metaphor than Michael [White]. In my work, I give more priority to conversations than to stories. |
And Tomm, by 1993, even has a kind of dialogic model of the mind (much
like Bakhtin),
apparently. Tomm tells us:
| I regard a personal story as a concatenation of internalized conversations and find that the complexity of a full story renders it more distant from experience than a conversation that may be a component of the story. Furthermore, for me as a physician, it is going a bit too far to suggest that lives are constituted by stories and to say that "stories provide the structure of life." |
Thus, we see, the evolution of Tomm's own independent voice emrging from his own eclecticism. He still seems to be someone who continues to admire and respect the work of Michael White.
Nevertheless, he finds ways to to be eclectic with White's theories.
He harvests one thing from White's model, and rejects another. For
another example, he notes that while White bases his work on Foucault,
his own work, Tomm says, is based on Maturana. In Tomm's words:
| My own personal intersets have drawn me to Maturana (rather than Foucault) as a theoretical resource. Maturana's perspective seems less pessimistic than Foucault's; however, in many respects they are quite compatible. |
Thus, Tomm shows us his path of rethinking Narrative Therapy for himself. To my mind this is the paralogical growth of Tomm's perspective.
It is, I believe, only in the marketing of any theory that it stands still in the consumer's mind. Consider how drastically Freud's theory changed over the forty years he wrote. How could any intelligent writer continue in the same unchanged, unimproved theory of things?
Living theories are continuously under revision, even as we discuss them, even as we encounter each new case.
The challenge is, it seems to me, how to stand on the shoulders of a good theorist like Michael White. Is it shameless of us to harvest what we see as the best in the crop of his ideas? And to weave these good ideas into the paralogical growth of our own thinking? Or do we owe something to a teacher to preserve his ideas in their original form?
I see that question as perhaps the biggest one of all. Unless we can find new ways to use ideas for our own eclectic growth, in the end, postmodernism will be reduced to just another school of thought. What it has to teach us that is most precious is this ability that Tomm has shown, the ability to cherish one set of ideas but to change them in ways that seem promising with remarkable irreverence.
I much admire Tomm's ability to learn from White, and to honor that
learning, while, at the same time, to explore his own thinking and to honor
the wisdom of his own voice.