Narrative Therapy: Wandering with King Arthur and Dr. Watson— Povl E.B. Jensen
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It has been my ambition in recent years to persuade psychiatrists and doctors to include narrative therapy in their daily work practice. Likewise, by taking the best of two worlds, narrative therapy and psychiatry in harmony, I hope to inspire narrative therapists to consider that psychiatry is not the enemy, but can be put to very valuable use. My main point is that a person’s sense of identity, competence and ‘personal agency’ is paramount. Mental illness or disorder has a unique ability to undermine this, and mainstream psychiatry (with medical focus on pathology) is poorly equipped to hold the pieces together, let alone help strengthen selfconcept and self-esteem. By including basic narrative therapy strategies and concepts (like ‘double-listening’, rescuing exceptions to the disqualifying problem-story, use of metaphors and attending to ‘the absent but implicit’) we can achieve a far better engagement between patient/client and psychiatrist/therapist.
