ABSTRACT
Narrative therapy is an example of a ‘patient-centred’ psychotherapeutic technique. While many counselling techniques include stories or narratives as part of their process, the term narrative therapy specifi cally refers to a method devised by an Australian, Michael White, and a New Zealander, David Epston. The central tenet is that the patient never is or even has the problem but rather that the problem has come into the patient’s life. As Michael White put it in the summer of 1988: ‘The patient is not the problem, the problem is the problem.’1 Patients are viewed as experts in their own lives and cultures, making it a patient-centred approach. However, while patient-centred consultations involve exploring a patient’s ideas, concerns, expectations and the effects of the problem on his or her life, narrative therapy also looks at the effects of the patient’s life on the problem. Thus, the main difference between the patientcentred therapies such as narrative therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), for instance, is that narrative therapy explores the solution to the problem in detail rather than concentrating on the problem. It focuses on the patient’s world and the life of the problem in that world. The therapist helps the patient use his or her own skills, beliefs, values, motivation and capabilities to help resolve the problem in the most appropriate way for that patient. Whereas CBT assumes that the patient’s thoughts and actions are faulty and in need of repair, narrative therapy assumes that the patient is doing the best they can under the circumstances. In this chapter we look at
the nature of narrative therapy and describe our modifi ed approach to its use in transcultural interactions.
