ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the solution-focused discourse by considering the interrelated practical and intellectual contexts within which the solution-focused brief therapy emerged. A major context for the development of solution-focused brief therapy is the organization and practice of ecosystemic brief therapy. While practicing ecosystemic brief therapy, the Northland Clinic staff sometimes described changes in clients' lives as miracles, but their development of the miracle question was unrelated to this usage of the term. The Northland Clinic staff reflected on and recast their practices and assumptions by bringing new philosophical assumptions, concerns, and perspectives to bear on them. A particularly important shift was the therapists' adaptation and incorporation of ideas associated with poststructuralism into their therapy. A major theme in poststructuralism is the rejection of the past, dominant assumption that social reality can be understood and comprehensively represented within a single theoretical scheme or metanarrative. Poststructuralists offer a very different view of language.
