ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines three perspectives: narrative approaches, personal construct theory, and theories of attributions and accounts which help to extend systemic theory and practice. Narratives or stories serve to connect, make sense of, and integrate events into meaningful sequences over time. For systemic perspectives an exploration of narratives or stories is particularly essential because this is the manner in which people not only describe their relationships to professionals such as therapists and researchers, but also to each other and to themselves. George Kelly's' personal construct theory, which offered a systematic model of the processes whereby therapists actively develop constructions of events, has much to offer and can complement a narrative perspective. Weber suggests that, when people form narratives or accounts of their lives, these can be seen in terms of stories and master stories, or narratives and meta-narratives.
