ABSTRACT
Why was Sophie’s World (Gaarder, 1994) the only history of philosophy to have ever been in the bestseller lists of fiction? Most observers judge that its clever narrative handling brought this often turgidly presented subject to a level of accessibility never previously achieved. If this is true, then is it possible that the therapist’s clinical repertoire could well include an element of narrative competence? Eventually, Sophie learned that she was only a character in someone else’s story. She had begun by assuming she was real. Now her problem was how to avoid remaining unreal. The end of that story shows her initial efforts to create a story ‘re-vision’ (Parry and Doan, 1994). She had to develop a real story of her own (Freedman and Combs, 1996), i.e. to ‘authorise’ her own narrative.
