Journal of Marital and FamilyTherapy

1998,Vol.24, NO.4,397-403

WHERE IS THE FAMILY IN

NARRATIVEFAMILYTHERAPY?
Salvador Minuchin
Family Studies, Inc

Last September I participated in a workshop on family therapy in which four people

with different, clearly articulated, points of view were invited to present a clinical case that
would then be discussed by the other three presenters. Representing the more traditional
view in family therapy were Mauricio Andolfi and myself. Insoo Kim Berg represented the
solution-focused approach, and Karl Tomm, postmodernism.
To my surprise, the latter two presented sessions in which only one member of the
family was interviewed. Insoo Kim Berg worked with an African American welfare moth-
er who had two children in foster care. Karl Tomm also interviewed a single person, a
mother, but asked questions directed at her internalized daughter.
The experience at the end of two days was disquieting. It seemed to me that Insoo
Kim Berg and Karl Tomm were arguing that “family therapy” does not require working
with the family. This made me wonder whether the postmodernist ideas that seem so
prevalent in the literature of the field had anything to do with the disappearance of the
family from the therapeutic process.
Though I am a systemic family therapist, 1 felt qualified to consider the effect of post-
modernist ideas on the way families are approached and responded to in narrative fami-
ly therapy. I arrived, then, at two questions. First, can social constructionism as a metathe-
ory help family therapists to a better understanding of how families function?And second,
does this theoretical shift imply a new direction for family practice?
Now 1 began to look for definitions of social constructionism itself in discussions by
its supporters and critics outside the field of family therapy. 1 started with Kenneth Gergen
(1994), who says that social constructivism “is a revolution that . . . replaces the dualist
epistemology of a knowing mind confronting a material world with a social epistemolo-
gy. The locus of knowledge is no longer taken to be the individual mind, but rather pat-
terns of social relatedness” (p. 129).
Social constructionism, state Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry (1997) “is both simple
and astoundingly powerful. Stated baldly, the thesis is that reality is socially constructed
by the powerful in order to perpetuate their own hegemony” (p. 123). In a similar vein,
Foucault (cited in Farber and Sherry, 1997) said, “What counts as objective knowledge is
a power relation, one category of people benefiting at the expense of another category of
people” (p. 124).
I respond with profound sympathy to the political stance expressed in these state-
ments. They are in sync with some of the challenges the Left has always posed to the

Salvador Minuchin, MD is Director of Family Studies, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts.

October 1998 JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY 397

exploitative power of capitalist and imperialist forces in society. They seem to carry the
optimism of the movements in the sixties: that the strengths and diversity of the oppressed
could be welded into a liberating political discourse.
But I was also concerned. By now, it seems to me, the voices of the oppressed have
not only multiplied but have become diffuse. Instead of being transformed into a politi-
cal force, this postmodern challenge has become almost wholly ideological. What, then,
could be the relationship of social constructionism to the intensely pragmatic practice of
family therapy? How were these ideas affecting family therapists’ view of families and of
the family therapy process?
It seemed clear that some family therapists were taking a political stance in their work
on the basis of social constructionism. For instance, Harlene Anderson (1997) states that

The dominant voice, the culturally designated professional voice, usually speaks
and decides for marginal populations - gender, economic, ethnic, religious,
political, and racial minorities . . . Sometimes unwittingly, sometimes knowing-
ly, therapists subjugate or sacrifice a client to the influences of this broader con-
text, which is primarily patriarchal, authoritarian, and hierarchical. (p. 71)

Freedman and Combs (1996) believe that

dominant stories can be subjugating of persons’ lives . . stories of gender, race,

class, age, sexual orientation, and religion are so prevalent and entrenched in
our culture that we can get caught up in them without realizing it.
Deconstruction, in White’s sense, can help us unmask the so-called “truths”that
“hide” their biases and prejudices . . . In adopting and advocating this type of
deconstruction,we are taking a political stand against certain practices of power
in our society. (p. 57)

Now my questions multiplied. Although I felt I understood the political position of

social constructionism, I was unsure of its applicabilityto family therapy. Specifically,how
was the narrative practice that has grown out of social constructionist theory dealing with
the relationships of family members?
I wasn’t sure it was, and this seemed very odd to me. Gergen’s statement that the
locus of knowledge is no longer in the individual mind but in the pattern of social relat-
edness reminded me forcibly of Bateson’s all-embracing systems theory, which launched
family therapy in the 1960s. But if this was so, how could social constructionism be dic-
tating a practice of family therapy that did not include the family? I began to ask myself
whether this metatheory concerning the construction of reality had a theory about fami-
lies at all. How would this theory explain bonding? Or the affiliations between family
members that create subgroups, and sometimes scapegoating? How does it explain the
way conflict between parents affects their children’s views of themselves? How does it
frame the complexities of divorce and remarriage, or the way individual family members
select certain family functions and certain styles of interpersonal transactions?
Can narrativist practice growing out of social constructionist theory deal with the pat-
terns of relationship between family members, where the locus of knowledge is believed
to exist? Or must it focus only on the way each individual family member makes sense of
the family reality?In other words, can a narrative therapist work with the family as a social

398 JOURNAL OF MARITALAND FAMILY THERAPY October 1998

system?
I think Harlene Anderson would say no. She says, “ratherthan learning a family’slan-
guage, we were learning the particular language of each member of a family system. The
family did not have a language, but its individual members did . . . ” (Anderson, 1997, p.
61). The reason she prefers to gloss over the family seems to be that for her, family has
become a restricting concept. “It implies a priori who should be seen and why, without
regard to the unique situation and the individuals communicatingwith each other and with
the therapists about the problem” (p. 81). “Consequentlywe were less inclined to see or
consider it necessary to see whole families. Much of our work was done with individuals,
parts of families, and members of the larger system” (pp. 66-67.
It seems to me that the family context disappears in Anderson’swriting. On the basis
of a powerful political ideology, she poses the family as the vehicle through which social
formulas are transmitted to the individual. Thus it becomes the function of the therapist to
liberate family members from the family’s constraining narrative.
Similarly, in “NarrativeTherapy,” Freedman and Combs (1996) tell us that they pre-
fer to “interact with one person in a family while the others listen . . . This way of work-
ing again makes people an audience to each other, themselves, and their relationships, but
we now go a step further. We ask people to reflect on what they’ve heard. . . Their reflec-
tions then become part of the narrative. . . This process is a vivid example of the social
construction of reality.” (p. 187)
Instead of observing the way in which family members affect each other in their trans-
actions, creating patterns that enhance and constrain the view of self and others, these nar-
rativists tend to privilege the discourse of individual members. Other family members are
made the audience. The systemic idea that family members coconstmct meaning, and that
one can observe them in the process of constructing individual and family stories, is lost.
The family, that natural interpersonal context in which people develop their views of
themselves in the world, disappears from practice.
The invisibility of the family in narrativist practice struck me as very strange, because
at first sight there seems to be nothing in social constructionist theory that would dictate
this type of practice. Quite on the contrary. Because the family is the context where infants
and young children learn about self and others, about beliefs of what is real and objec-
tive, and about stories that will color their reality, one would expect narrative therapists to
flock to this natural laboratory of story making. Focusing on the individual seems to go
against Kenneth Gergen and Jerome Bruner’sview of self as a social construct. As Bruner
notes, our culturally adapted view of life depends upon shared meanings. Self is a con-
struction that proceeds from the outside in as well as from the inside out (Bruner, 1996).
No family therapist could say it better. But here’s the rub. Both Gergen and Bruner
jump over the family as an intermediate construct and deal directly with people in the larg-
er culture. It seems that, in the end, the self that is located in the midst of culture and is
surrounded by the culture stands alone. The self that constructs reality with the kit that the
culture provides is a self without significant others to relate to.
Perhaps in jumping over the family, social constructionists have embodied the
antifamily, antipatriarchal bias of radical liberation ideology. But whatever the reason is,
it seems to me that the answer to my first question, whether social constructionism as a
metatheory can help family therapists understand the way the family functions, would be
no. And that is cause for concern. In the last 40 years a body of research about families
has grown up in the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, genetics, and

October 1998 JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY 399

pediatrics, among others. An understanding of family functioning now spans all types of
populations in different cultures, classes, and contexts. Specific problems like addiction,
violence, aging, and psychosomatic illnesses are being studied and addressed. Should this
tremendous diversity and specificity be bypassed on the basis of an all-encompassing
metatheory? I am not dismissing the contributions of social constructionism, but in my
view, the usefulness of this theory for understanding how families function should be
examined with a critical eye.
As to my second question, whether this theory dictates a particular form of family
therapy, I think it is clear that the answer is yes. Narrative therapists are concerned with
the misuse of power, focusing on the way dominant social discourses control the way peo-
ple perceive their reality. As therapists, therefore, they want above all, to avoid imposing
the therapist’s personal frame on the patient’s understanding of reality. This concern with
the issue of control has resulted in a variety of techniques oriented toward the organiza-
tion of a nonhierarchical, collaborative type of therapy. Practitioners share a penchant for
a therapy of questions, on the assumption that questions are more respectful of the
patient’s own framework than are comments, interpretations, or prescriptions. The social
concern for liberating people from the dominant discourses that marginalize them leads
these therapists to minimize therapists’ statements of expertise - to taking a stance of
“not knowing.” Paralleling the social constructionist acceptance of diversity and multicul-
turalism, their interventions are oriented toward increasing diversity in the internalized
voices of the patients. Unfortunately, in my view, that focus decreases attention to the
patterns of interaction presently being played out by family members.
To understand the impact of this theory on the field, it’s necessary to move away from
the prose and concentrate on the practice - on the actual movements that occur during
therapy. In considering the second question, therefore, I will describe the work of differ-
ent practitioners. The segments I present are of course partial, and as I look at them from
a different perspective, I may distort them. But I hope to give the reader the sense of a
varied practice informed by a common ideology.
I will first present two therapists whose concern for the significance of culture appears
to marginalize the importance of family experience. I will then address myself to two other
therapists, whose concern for the richness of individual experience also appears to mar-
ginalize the importance of the family experience.
First, in a workshop at the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, Gene Combs
showed a tape of an African American mother and her withdrawn, shy, young adult son
who was a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Combs started by suggesting to the identified
patient that it might be dangerous in the United States for a Black American to share his
thoughts. As the young man started to answer, his mother engaged Combs in an animat-
ed conversation about prejudice and racism. The identified patient listened silently. Later,
Combs introduced the idea that in some hospitals antipsychotic drugs are being prescribed
more to African Americans than to White patients.
In both interventions, Combs joined with the marginalized voices of the disem-
powered. I liked his activist involvement with social issues. But I felt that the nature of
the transactions between mother and son was marginalized by Combs’s privileging the
political focus. Did he notice that the mother’s energetic way of talking for her son
silenced him? And did he realize that by participating actively in a dialogue with the
mother he contributed to the identified patient’s silence? Were these interventions ther-
apeutic for the family?

400 JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND F M I L Y THERAPY October 1998

 The second example comes from the multicultural constructionist approach of the Just
Therapy team of New Zealand. Some years ago, Monica McGoldrick invited this group,
along with myself, to present together in a workshop. We were to alternate our interviews,
seeing the same families over a two-day period. I began the first interview with an African
American family on welfare, in which a drug-addicted mother of three children was dying
of AIDS. Uncles and aunts had taken over the care of the children. The family drama was
familiar to me, because I had worked often with families who had had similar experiences,
and I conducted an interview that I thought was respectful, compassionate,and explorato-
ry, but also looking for expanded solutions.
The family was interviewed the second day by Charles Waldegrave. He interviewed
each family member in turn, taking care that all of them expressed something about their
feelings and views about the family situation. He empathized with the family plight and
tracked the feelings of its members, but he did not respond to any of the statements that
people presented. He was questioning and supportive but provided no feedback.
After his interview, Waldegrave met with three African American middle-class profes-
sional women who had observed the interview and were his cultural consultants. They
proceeded to tell Waldegrave the cultural meaning of some of the events the family
described and helped him write a statement that he read back to the family. Waldegrave
made no use of the 1-1/2 -hour interview I had had with the same family the previous
day. It was clear that for him the specificity of the human drama in this particular family
was less important than their cultural context. It was as if the story the family described as
their idiosyncratic experience needed to pass through the screen of a cultural committee,
whose minority status constituted a presumption of expertise.
To me, this multicultural political stance, although probably socially correct, was ther-
apeutically questionable.The therapist was careful not to give feedback to the family about
their personal drama. How then could he be comfortable in providing a lengthy report,
read to the family twice, about the meaning of their reality in the cultural context? Is that
not imposing the therapist’s own cultural perspective on the family story?
The last two therapists I want to consider are Karl Tomm and Michael White. At the
workshop I described earlier in this paper, Tomm interviewed the mother of a young adult
woman who was the identified patient. In this interview, he directed his questions to the
internalized daughter, asking the mother to search for the responses the daughter might
give to his questions. In the dialogue between Tomm and the mother, the therapist’s pos-
ture was one of expertise, even though his interventions were in the form of questions.
Tomm pointed out how the interview had increased the mother’s understanding of
the daughter’s worldview, and said that the mother later described to the daughter the
effect of the interview and the changes brought about in her perception of their relation-
ship. He noted that he alternates such individual sessions with sessions that include mul-
tiple family members, surely a time-honored technique in family therapy. For the purpose
of our discussion, however, the noteworthy aspect was the therapist’s active guidance of
the interview, in which the questions were clearly posed by an expert who knew what
direction he believed would be productive. In directing his efforts toward increasing and
modlfying the internalized voices of family members as a way of changing their related-
ness, Tomm raised the question again, from my perspective, of why this therapy does not
deal directly with family interactions.
The last therapist is Michael White. I will describe two cases that he presented at the
Family Networker Symposium in February 1998. Talking about the construction of identi-

October 1998 JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND F M I L Y THERAPY 401

ties, White noted the importance of telling a story, retelling it, and then retelling the
retelling as a way of thickening the description of self. To illustrate his point, he present-
ed the case of an 8-year-old boy who was referred by the school to help him assert
himself. When White first met with the parents and the child, the story the child told
was one of being teased by other children. In White’s terms, it was a case of peer
abuse. White suggested to the counselor a conjoint meeting of parents, children, and
teachers at the school to explore the nature of peer abuse in the school culture.
Because his suggestion was not accepted, he asked permission of the parents and child
to invite three former clients of his who had had similar experiences of peer abuse in
school to attend a session.
In the first segment, as the parents watched from behind a one-way mirror, White
asked the child to tell his story while the other children became the audience. Then he
asked this audience of children to retell the story while the boy listened. After that, the
parents were asked to tell how they heard the story, while the children listened. First the
mother, then the father, described in very different ways their new understanding of their
son. The story, White said, became thicker with each retelling. As a result of this experi-
ence, the parents contacted other parents in the school whose children had felt abused
and engaged them in the process of changing the school culture.
White’s interviewing of each subgroup was respectful of the people and of the
nuances of the telling, and his questions explored alternative meanings in the child’s def-
inition of self and of life. It is clear his questions carried a direction. They were carefully
crafted to encourage people in the exploration of new meaning, and seemingly the expe-
rience of the participants was one of personal discovery. But although the therapist was
central and used himself in organizing the context and process of the session, his influ-
ence was not explored.
One cannot but admire the parsimonious nature of this intervention, which accom-
plished so much, and the aesthetic of White’s careful inquiry. One could see how White
was focused on the “thickening”of each individual story. He never explored the culture
of the family, however, explicitly discouraging dialogue and structuring others as a “wit-
ness group,” so that family members became each other’s audience in the process of
increasing individual voices.
Another case presented by White involved the treatment of a couple. The wife in
this case had a long history of serious self-destructive behavior. In the illustrative ses-
sion, the woman had asked her husband not to speak, and both husband and thera-
pist honored this request. Although the husband was present, the session was con-
ducted like an individual session. White asked questions oriented toward “re-member-
ing”: a process he uses to increase or modify the membership of internalized voices,
as a way of offering alternative descriptions of a patient’s life. The woman said that she
remembers a warm relationship with her mother as an infant, which became destruc-
tive when as a toddler she was hospitalized for a medical illness. As she was talking,
one could observe how White listened to her story. His elbows were on his knees and
his face was cupped in his hands; a wide smile crinkled his face, and his whole body
was intensely focused on the woman. Suddenly she said, “I feel it now. The same sense
of warmth all over my skin.” White, after some hesitation, asked her if she could con-
sider sharing this remembering with her mother. He then stopped the tape he was pre-
senting and said to the audience that he had made a gross mistake with this suggestion,
carrying his own enthusiasm ahead of the client’s own decision.

402 JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY October 1998

 As a member of the audience, I was mystified. I thought this was an interesting ses-
sion, and this seemed an important moment for the client. She was responding positively
to White’s emotional involvement in her story. Why was he focusing on his “mistake”
instead of her reaction? What to me was a moment of shared love, empathy, and con-
nection had been made invisible - or incorrect - because the theory did not permit it.
Highlighting the significance of the therapist as a directing influence in the therapeutic
process would conflict with the view of the therapist as a collaborative explorer of peo-
ple’s own stories.
In the end, what are the narrativists bringing to the family therapy field? First, a focus
on multiple descriptions and alternative meanings, which challenges the emphasis on
diagnosis and deficit. Second, a concern with the therapists’ power to influence their
clients, leading to a kind of practice that highlights collaboration between patient and ther-
apist. Third, an elegant exploration of language in the form of questions. Fourth, a num-
ber of techniques that enrich the clients’ narrow descriptions of their experience: reflect-
ing teams, witnessing groups, letter writing, telling and retelling of stories, and a major
focus on internalized voices. In and of themselves, interesting developments.
But what are they shedding? First, the observation of dialogues among family mem-
bers and their effects on interpersonal patterns. Second, the spontaneous and induced
enactments that transform a session into a live scenario, with transactions among family
members that are multiply voiced and multiply acted out. Third, the recognition of the
therapist’s knowledge as a positive force for healing. Fourth, the realization that a thera-
pist’s participation in the family process provides an experiential connectedness with the
family and allows for the use of self as witness, collaborator, expander, and enricher of
experience. Fifth, the acknowledgment that it’s impossible for the therapist to function
without bringing a personal bias into the situation; if that reality remains invisible, it must
inevitably distort the patient-therapist relationship. Those are serious losses.
Narrative therapy has moved away from systemic principles in order to highlight con-
text and culture, but there is something paradoxical in this movement. In the process, the-
orists seem to have misplaced the family - that prominent, intermediate locus of context
and culture within which people live - and practitioners have returned to an emphasis
on individual human psychology that not only is traditional but does not fit the parts of
postmodern theory that emphasize social relatedness. By shedding multiple voices in the
family therapy field, narrative therapists have thickened a singular voice that does not fully
reflect the reality of human experience.

REFERENCES
Anderson, H. (1997). Conversation,language, andpossibilities: Apostmodern approach to ther-
apy. New York: Basic Books.
Bmner, J. (1996). 7be culture of education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Farber, D. A,, & Sherry, S. (1997). Beyond all reason: 7be radical assault on truth in American
law. New York: Oxford University Press.
Freedman, J., 62 Combs, G. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction ofprejerred real-
ities. New York: W.W. Norton.
Gergen, K. J. (1994). Realities and relationsbaps: Soundings in social construction.Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.

October 1998 JOURNAL OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPY 403