Narrative and psychotherapy: Introduction to the special section

Polkinghorne (2004) described narrative as ‘‘the form that displays life as a temporal unfolding’’ (p. 54). In psychotherapy, clients display and make meaning of their lives through the stories they tell and retell to their therapists. Through this telling and retelling, they change their lives. Somehow, they transform true stories of problems into true stories of adaptation and meaningfulness. Psychotherapy, from this perspective, is not only about symptom reduction, but also about meaning transformation. This special section reports six investigations of how the transformation is accomplished. Basic research, like that conducted by Pennebaker (1993) and McAdams (see Baerger and McAdams, 1999) suggests ways that narrative transformation might contribute to life adjustment. Pennebaker showed how the activity of writing on meaningful topics can produce gains in mental and physical health. Baerger and McAdams showed how narrative coherence is associated with psychological wellbeing, the converse of what therapists know well from their practice: that most of clients begin therapy with a fragmented notion of themselves and have difficulties integrating disparate experiences into a coherent whole. Narrative perspectives have had increasing influence on practice and research in psychotherapy. Handbooks (e.g., Angus & McLeod, 2004; Lieblich, McAdams, & Josselson, 2004) and special sections in journals (e.g., Dimaggio, 2006; Machado & Goncalves, 1999) document this growing interest in narrative as a tool for therapists and for researchers. We hope that this special section conveys the vitality of narrative research in psychotherapy and shows how narrative theory, research, and practice are currently enhancing each other. An increasing number of research groups are using narrative as a methodological tool (see Angus & McLeod, 2004). For example, the Narrative Process Coding System has been used to investigate how different modes of narrative production (internalizing, externalizing and reflexive) evolve through therapy and how they are related to emotional processes (e.g., Angus, Levitt, & Hardtke, 1999). The Core Conflictual Relationship Themes has been used to analyze narratives that reveal, from a psychodynamic perspective, how clients’ conscious and unconscious relational patterns shape (and may damage) their interactions with others (e.g., Luborsky & Crits-Christoph, 1990; Wilczek, Weinryb, Barber, Gustavsson, & Asberg, 2000, 2004). The Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Scale has been used to show how voices that were dissociated from the self generate suffering and how they can be integrated (assimilated) during successful psychotherapeutic treatment through narratives (e.g., Osatuke et al., 2004; Stiles, Honos-Webb, & Lani, 1999). The Metacognition Assessment Scale and associated tools have been used to distinguish forms of narrative disruption associated with psychopathology and how these disruptions are repaired during psychotherapy of personality disorders (Dimaggio & Semerari, 2006; Semerari et al., 2003). The Personal Positions Repertoire has been used to investigate how the relationship between I-positions can be used to characterize transformations in self-narratives, inside and outside of psychotherapy (Hermans & Hermans-Jansen, 2004). The Innovative Moments Coding System has been