• Look for openings to help couples discover solution building rather than problem solving language.

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• Encourage lovers to own their own agendas without hiding from each other or going underground.

• Help couples enjoy their own unique values, opinions and attitudes in a lively, spirited, on-going debate that makes for a more exciting and passionate intimate relationship. The solution focused therapist will always help couples celebrate rather than hide their differences.

• Focus on solutions instead of dwelling on old problematic ways of understanding and suffering through old conflicts.

• Look for quick, actionable solutions over the course of 3 to 4 sessions.

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She then goes on to show how careless language can result in subjugated minimized subjects by applying the concept of position calls to the expression of power relations in everyday life). And she uses two compelling examples to make her case: that of a despicable physical education teacher who browbeats his student and a very anxious mother who blames her son for not taking better care of himself. Specifically, she deconstructs the conversations in these two encounters using four key therapeutic concepts:

1. Choosing to “speak in ways that do not invite people into polarized positions and oppositional relationships” (Drewery, 2005, p. 315).

2. The importance of encouraging participants in a conversation to take an “agentive position” in which they have the opportunity to participate “as moral actors in and producers of the conditions of their lives” (Drewery, 2005, p. 315).

3. Distinguishing between good position calls that offer a participant the chance to respond as a true agent versus bad position calls that only offer the participant the opportunity to respond as a subjugated or passive subject (Drewery, 2005, p. 316).

4. The importance of “skillfully finding ways of speaking that do not presume to know the meaning that is made of their experience by the other” (p. 318). And Drewery emphasizes how crucial this goal is by enlisting Foucault and his concept of “respectful curiosity” and Michael White and his deep appreciation of the importance of installing “the person whose life is being spoken about as the expert by thickening the narrative that positions him or her agentively” (Drewery, 2005, p. 319).

But the most stimulating aspect of Wendy Drewery’s paper is to be found in what she proposes near the end of it: nothing less than the elimination of self-concept and self-esteem as “stable…aspects of the psychological self ”(Drewery, 2005, p. 320). A few nights ago in a recent episode of the Charlie Rose Brain Series, Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for demonstrating that psycho-educational experiences have a measurable impact on brain chemistry, made the crucial point that Freud always recognized that his hypotheses of an id, ego and superego were nothing more than mere hypotheses, even intelligent speculations, and that there was no implication whatsoever of fixed structure. It was mainly the Americans who reified Freud’s hypotheses by enshrining them as irrefutable, categorical definitions (think DSM-IV-TR here) of human identity. Back then, Kandel emphasized, Freud didn’t have tools such as fMRI’s to measure palpable changes in brain activity in response to various social or conversational stimuli. He then concluded in a delightfully animated, passionate manner that if Freud were alive today, he would most certainly be a neuroscientist!

Does narrative therapy which draws attention to the ways in which people speak to each other – good ways and bad ways, particularly ways that exclude them from taking agentive positions (p. 320) – provide a means of empirically measuring trauma and healing as Wendy Drewery suggests or at least implies in her paper, now that we have the tools to observe their physiological effects? Imagine Freud today as a neuroscientist working closely with reflecting teams of narrative therapists engaged in relational exchanges with their clients!

Reference

Drewery, W., (2005). Why we should watch what we say: Position calls, everyday speech and production of relational subjectivity in Theory and Psychology. Sage Pulbications. Vol 15 (3): 305-324. www.sagepublications.com

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In an interesting paper referenced below Michael Guilfoyle refers to a wonderfully refreshing notion that argumentation is not at all problematic but the prototypical manner of being in conversation for lovers, friends, family members and work colleagues; indeed for all human beings (Guifoyle, 2003, p. 335).  Guilfoyle then goes on to illustrate how the presentation of distinct points of view can be a crucial aspect, indeed the most distinguishing aspect, of dialogic therapy for therapists working with couples and families.

In a first illustration, he demonstrates how two friends, Joe and Mark reconcile their different points of view about how to spend an evening in an argument that enables them to come to a partial synthesis of their different positions.

In a second illustration, he demonstrates how the therapist’s understanding of the “most burning issue” for a client can be embedded in “a performance of not knowing.” The issue is: How the client and her lover can salvage something in their relationship.

And in a third illustration, Guilfoyle shows how the uncertainty in the second illustration is removed by the therapist when she becomes the sole author of and actually defines rather than tentatively suggests the burning issue for her client to consider: “…is there any chance…that the two of you can salvage something in your relationship…that both of you would like to have?” Extract 3 is especially convincing because it appears to be an actual transcript of the conversation between therapist and client.

In this post I want to demonstrate how two poems, presented as emotionally moving, dramatic metaphors, can function as potent pedagogical tools in demonstrating a completely subjugated position versus a fully agentive position in lovers’ dialogs. The first poem is entitled “You Must Accept” by Kate Light and the second, “I Married You” by Linda Pastan.

“You Must Accept”

You must accept that’s who he really is.
You must accept you cannot be his
unless he is yours. No compromise.
He is a canvas on which paint never dries;
a clay that never sets, steel that bends
in a breeze, a melody that when it ends
no one can whistle. He is not who
you thought. He’s not. He is a shoe
that walks away: “I will not go where you
want to go.” “Why, then, are you a shoe?”
“I’m not. I have the sole of a lover
but don’t know what love is.” “Discover
it, then.” “Will I have to go where you go?”
“Sometimes.” “Be patient with you?” “Yes.” “Then, no.”
You have to hear what he is telling you
and see what he is; how it is killing you.

It would be hard to find a more compelling example than this poem of Foucault’s notion of power as a total structure of action that incites, induces and seduces (Foucault, 1982). The poem grippingly portrays a powerful authoritative monologue delivered to a subjugated, passive subject. And in our patriarchal culture, of course, the subjugated, passive subject has to be a woman. But if we take a deeper look, is the voice of the woman really the woman’s or Kate Light’s? Indeed, why is the poem so emotionally gripping? I think this would be like asking Jane Austen if the voices of some of her female subjects (my favorite is Lizzie Bennett) are really so passive.

After “You Must Accept,” the poem “I Married You” is like a deep, delicious breath of fresh air.

I married you
for all the wrong reasons,
charmed by your
dangerous family history,
by the innocent muscles, bulging
like hidden weapons
under your shirt,
by your naive ties, the colors
of painted scraps of sunset.
I was charmed too
by your assumptions
about me: my serenity -
that mirror waiting to be cracked,
my flashy acrobatics with knives
in the kitchen.
How wrong we both were
about each other,
and how happy we have been.

Though expressed in the voice of only one of the lovers, this poem clearly evokes a spirited, humorous relationship in which for many years the two lovers have each enjoyed fully agentive positions in which they have entered each other’s hearts from well differentiated positions of power. I suspect Murray Bowen might be inclined to give this relationship his benediction, if he weren’t Jewish.

I wonder how Michael White would respond to the notion of using good metaphors in narrative therapy embedded in a performance of not knowing, metaphors that move clients emotionally.

References:

Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject of Power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rbinow3 (Eds.). Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208-226). New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Guilfoyle, M. A., (2003). Dialogue and Power: A Critical Analysis of Power in Dialogical Therapy, Family Process, 42, No. 3, pp. 331-343.

Light, K. (n.d.). You Must Accept in Gevity’s Dream: New Poems and Sonnets. West Chester University Poetry Center.

Pastan, L. (n.d.). I Married You in Queen of a Rainy Country. New York: W.W. Norton.