Narrative therapy and elders with memory loss by Elizabeth Young: Narrative means to different ends

Elizabeth Young’s article attempts to illustrate how certain techniques of classic narrative therapy can be applied in very brief short-term work with elderly persons in the early stages of memory loss due to Alzheimer’s Disease or a related disorder. Brief excerpts from three interviews, each with a different client, are used to support the writer’s argument that ‘‘narrative therapy can help people with dementia revise their stories and reclaim their identities.’’ Of particular interest to Young is the potential of narrative therapy to help the client resist the ‘‘cultural imperative’’ that one’s life be perceived in sequential order. In my commentary on her article I will not critique her account but use it as a springboard to reflect briefly on several interrelated matters: (1) the ‘‘genre’’ of therapist’s accounts of a particular type of practice and the problematics of student accounts in particular; (2) the commonalities of and differences between narrative inquiry (my practice) and narrative therapy as narrowly defined; and (3) the potential of collaboration between narrative practitioners and narrative researchers. Accounting for oneself as a therapist or as a commentator is a daunting task. As Leguin says it is not just our struggle with what to say or not to say—how to give another person or audience some sense of our experience and some confidence in what we say—it is also that we refashion, interpret and ‘‘fictionalize’’ our accounts when we tell them to ourselves. If we accept that this is the case then we can acknowledge the high degree of uncertainty about what is indeed factual and inclusive in any account. I am not sure that reported facts matter so much as long as we have some opportunity to ‘‘observe’’ the therapist or the client in action, allowing us to interpret what is going on according to our own interests and preferences, or to agree or disagree with the author’s own interpretation. As Elizabeth Young makes clear in her piece she is writing about her experience in a field work placement while completing her MSW. And although it is not explicitly stated, from her approach I would assume that her paper originated as an assignment for a course, probably one that required her to illustrate a practice method with examples from her field work. Such assignments are common in social work education but I would argue that they may, at times, have a negative impact on learning. That is, the student is reluctant to show uncertainty and doubt as she or he tries to fit the experience of learning a practice into the boxes of method as described in textbooks and canonical texts (in this case, Epston and White’s early works on narrative therapy). Such assignments may also reinforce the dominance of ‘‘the authority’’ and make it more difficult for the learner to critically reflect on his own learning. In spite of the constraints that the context of social work education may have placed on Young, she does a commendable job. Not only does she demonstrate a mastery of the early literature of narrative therapy, she manages to overcome somewhat the strictures of the expectations of ‘‘the instructor’’ by her empathic This is a comment to doi: 10.1007/s10615-008-0146-4.