POSTMODERN/

POSTSTRUCTURAL
THERAPY
 Overview

• Rather than believe themselves to be experts who can solve client problems, therapists using a
postmodern approach view the client as the expert. Such therapists want to enter the client’s
experience of life and explore his thoughts. Story is an important theme. How a client narrates his or
her own life is indicative of any problem he or she may be experiencing. 

• Social constructionists challenge conventional perspectives and believe that knowledge is socially
created and that language is culture-bound. Therapists explore client language and story, at times
challenging the client’s view, to help him become “unstuck”; that is, to help him find a different point
of view and a new set of actions. A client narrates his or her story in new ways to form new meanings.

• Many postmodern therapies attempt not to focus on a specific problem, but rather on a solution.
Clients are encouraged not to wallow in the past but to live in the present. Clients have the power to
live and view their lives as they see fit.
 Overview

•  Postmodern therapists highlight what works for the client and encourage continuation of the same.
The problem is that postmodernism does not define “useful.” Theoretically, a serial killer could view
his actions as acceptable because they make him feel better, and the postmodern therapist would have
to agree.

• Rather than affirm problems, therapists and clients look for exceptions. Therapy is not oriented toward
pathology but toward growth. Clients make and reach positive goals with the therapist’s assistance.
Some therapies aim at concrete actions, and others are oriented toward forming a new life narrative.
 Margarita Tarragona, PhD
a psychologist who specializes in personal and relational
transformation. As a clinician, coach, and organizational
consultant, she incorporates scientific findings on
flourishing from positive psychology with collaborative
and narrative ways of working with clients to generate
dialogue and expand their life stories.
POSTMODERN ERA

Postmodernity
• is used to refer to a cultural epoch or historical period (Grenz, 1996; Sarup, 1993).
• It would roughly correspond with a time beginning in the second half of the twentieth
century to present day.
• is characterized by an unprecedented speed and ease in transportation and
communications that leads to an interconnection between places, people, and cultures

Grenz (1996)
describes the industrial age, often identified as the , as a period centered on the production
of goods and symbolized by the factory, whereas postmodernity is characterized by the
production of information and can be represented by the computer.
POSTMODERN ERA

The Saturated Self, Kenneth Gergen

“New technologies make it possible to sustain relationships— directly or indirectly—with

an ever expanding range of other persons. In many respects we are reaching what may be
viewed as social saturation” (1990,p. 3).

• Gergen argues that these technological developments and the social saturation that they
create have a profound impact on our understanding of the self.
POSTMODERN ART

Postmodernism has had an impact in the arts, including postmodern architecture,

theatre, literature, painting, performance, and so on. Discussing postmodern artistic
expressions in detail is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice to say that they are
often characterized by deliberate juxtapositions of materials and styles and by an
eclectic aesthetic, in contrast to the univalence and stylistic integrity characteristic
on modern art. Postmodern artists frequently challenge cannons and institutions
and blur the line between high art and popular culture (Grenz, 1996).
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE

• The postmodern critique, a movement that began in academe in the 1970s, questioned the nature of
knowledge and meta-narratives or universal explanations. It was especially strong in the social
sciences where it questioned the possibility of being objective observers of reality, particularly of
the reality of human phenomena.

• The postmodern perspective is different from the modern position in many ways. A postmodern
view of knowledge proposes that it is socially constructed through language.

• One perspective that informs the postmodern view is social constructionism, a theory that proposes
that we are always looking at the world through some kind of lens— our theories, culture,
historical moment, gender, and so on (Hoffman, 1990).
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE

• Language is a central concept in the postmodern critique. One important idea is that
language constitutes reality. The words we use do not simply reflect or express what
we think or feel, but rather language configures our ideas and the meaning of our
experiences. Hoyt (1998) points out that we know and understand through our
language truth postmodern The Postmodern Condition: social knowledge meaning
systems.

• Language is more than a means to transmit information because it shapes our

conscience and structures our reality. Harry Goolishian, one of the founders of
collaborative therapy, used to say, “I never know what I mean until I say it” (Anderson,
2005, p. 4).
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE

Harlene Anderson (1997)

• it’s more important to think about postmodernism as a critique than as a historical period and
emphasizes that postmodern refers to a philosophical movement that includes the ideas of many
thinkers, like Mihail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard
Rorty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others.

• It supposes that “we cannot have a direct representation of the world, so we can only know it
through our experience of it.”
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE

(Gergen, 1991, Grenz, 1996; Sarup, 1993; Shawver, 2005)

• suggest that to understand the postmodern, it is useful to contrast it with the modern, which refers
to a worldview rooted in the Enlightment and prevalent in the Western world during most of the
twentieth century.

• The promise of continuous progress is what Gergen (1991 ) describes as the “grand narrative of
modernism”: the idea that we are on a journey of ever-increasing improvement and achievement.
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE

Grenz (1996)

• postmodernism “marks the end of a single, universal worldview. The postmodern ethos resists
unified, all-encompassing and universally valid explanations. It replaces these with a respect for
difference and a celebration of the local and particular at the expense of the universal”

• The modern ideal is that can be found through the scientific method. Grenz says, “the modern
mind assumes that knowledge is certain, objective and good” (1996, p. 4).
POSTMODERN CRITIQUE
20th century

• During the twentieth century, radios, cars, telephones, television, airplanes, spaceships, and
computers were all invented. Medicine advanced in giant leaps, improving the life expectancy and
quality of life of millions in developed nations. Science and technology were seen as an unlimited
source of hope for the future (Shawver, 2005).

• Gergen notes that the “social sciences” were developed in the twentieth century with the ideal of
finding the rules that can explain and predict human behavior.

• Psychology was redefined as a science “and its participants adopted the methods, metatheories and
manners of the natural sciences” (1991, p. 30). One implication of this is the Postmodern Art
Postmodern Critique Postmodernism meta-narratives belief that people, like the world, can be
known though observation and examination because we can also get to know a “true and
accessible” self (Gergen, 1991).
POSTSTRUCTURALISM

• Belsey defines it as “a theory or group of theories, concerning the relationship between human
beings, the world, and the practice of making and reproducing meanings”

• poststructuralism proposed that the meaning of a text is not in the text, inherent in what is written,
but that meaning emerges or is produced as the reader interacts with the text. (Grenz, 1996; Sarup,
1993).

• Accoridng to the leading poststructuralist thinkers are Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan; A central
concept in poststructuralism is deconstruction, a method of closely reading a text that allows us to
see that no meaning is fixed.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM

• The relationship between poststructuralism and postmodernism is not clear cut. For example,
Grenz (1996) talks about Foucault and Derrida as postmodern philosophers, whereas Sarup (1993)
mentions them as two leading poststructuralists.

• Harlene Anderson (1997) says that even though postmodernism and poststructuralism are often
blended, they come from different intellectual traditions. Grenz (1991) says, “postmodern
philosophers applied the literary theories of the deconstructionists to the world as a whole”.

• Postmodern and poststructuralist therapists do not search for deep structures or a true self, but
they are interested in people’s stories as they choose to tell them.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM

In the world of therapy

• some authors find that postmodernism is too broad a term because it is used to refer to the arts,
philosophy, and popular culture. Michel White (2004) prefers to describe narrative therapy as
poststructuralist.

Poststructuralism
• as it relates to psychotherapy, also has to do with questioning structuralist ideas, like the notion
that people’s difficulties are the “surface manifestations” of invisible, deep-seated structures.

Russell and Carey (2004)

explain that structuralist concepts in psychology “led many of us to believe that if we wanted to know
‘the truth’ about a person, we had to peel away the ‘layers’ of the self. Structuralism implied that ‘deep
down’ somewhere we could find the ‘inner self’ and therefore ‘the truth’ of the person’s identity”
TEXT ANALOGY AND NARRATIVE METHAPHOR

TEXT ANALOGY

White and Epston (1989)

• state that we all use maps or analogies to make sense of our world. These are our interpretative
frameworks, or the analogies we chose determine how we understand events and the actions we
take.

• prefer use of a text analogy to guide their work as therapists. From this perspective, problems can be
construed as certain kinds of stories and their solution can be found in the authoring of different,
alternative stories.
TEXT ANALOGY AND NARRATIVE METHAPHOR

NARRATIVE METAPHOR

• emphasizes the importance of stories or narratives in people’s lives.

• Narrative psychology proposes that human beings organize life experience as stories of events that
have temporal sequences, developments, and outcomes all fraught with meaning.

Bruner (1987 )
• we become the narratives that we construct to tell our lives.

Anderson
• narrative is more than a metaphor about storytelling: “it is a reflexive, two way discursive
processes. It constructs our experiences and in turn it is used to understand our experiences.
Language is the vehicle of this process: we use it to construct, to organize and to attribute meaning
to our stories”
TEXT ANALOGY AND NARRATIVE METHAPHOR

• The self, according to Anderson “is an on-going autobiography; or, to be more exact, it is a self-
other multifaceted biography that we constantly pen and edit”

Contemporary thinkers

K. Gergen (1994) and R. Rorty (1979)

• propose that throughout our lives we are constantly revising our stories and that we modify the
meaning of events and relationships. Our personal narratives are fluid and they take place in the
context of our interpersonal relationships and our linguistic exchanges with other people.