Towards a ‘Poethics’ of Therapeutic Practice: Extending the Relationship of Ethics and Aesthetics in Narrative Therapies Through a Consideration of the Late Work of Michel Foucault— Sheridan Linnell

This paper seeks to extend the narrative metaphor for therapy through further considerations of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in narrative practice. This is a story peopled with both real and imaginary beings – including a partially retired detective, a wise young girl and her family, two poststructural philosophers, several sailors, sundry narrative practitioners, a few million frogs and a talking (and flying) piece of fruit. Drawing on aspects of the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Couze Venn, the writer tells how she has come to think of her therapeutic practice as an ‘ethics and aesthetics of existence’, in the form of an ‘apprenticeship to the other’. However, the paper does not privilege the philosophy of philosophers (or for that matter the therapy of therapists) above local knowledges. At the heart of this paper is the story of a particular family, their ethics and aesthetics of existence, and what Sheridan took back into her own identity and practice from her meetings with this family.