The Narrative Turn: Postmodern Theory and Systemic Therapy1

by

Eugene K. Epstein, Ph.D.

Thorner Str. 14
26121 Oldenburg
Tel: 0441/664916

Abstract
Postmodern theories have promoted critical reassessment of a wide variety of disciplines
within the academy. In recent years, a growing number of psychologists and psychotherapists
have begun to explore the implications of postmodern ideas for the theory and practice of
psychotherapy. The author provides an overview of some of the postmodern challenges to
various fundamental assumptions in psychology and psychotherapy. In particular, the
implications of a shift in thinking from the modernist notion of the “self” to a postmodern notion
of “multiple selves”, socially constructed in language, are explored. The outline of a
postmodern or narrative psychotherapy is here described. In so doing, earlier ideas found within
the systemic therapies about problem definition, the role of the therapist, the process of therapy
and therapist expertise are problematized and redefined.

The signs of postmodernism are all about us, evident in the preferential status accorded to
image over meaning, present over past and future, subjectivity over objectivism, the local over
the universal, and the relative over the certain. The lines between good and bad, forward and
back, self and other , author and reader, reader and text are increasingly blurred. Appeals to
scientific “facts” no longer resolve conflicts, since these facts themselves have been shown by
postmodernist critics to be social constructions, mere tools of persuasion. The white, male
eurocentrically biased curricula of the academy have come under increasing attack, as have the
traditional divisions of the academic disciplines themselves. For better or worse, the bodies of
knowledge that we took to be cumulative, verifiable, objective, fixed and universal have been
separated from their foundationalist and essentialist roots.

Truth is no longer to be spelled with a capital “T.” All that has been previously accepted as
knowledge and collective wisdom is now open to question and is scrutinized for exclusionary and
discriminatory bias. Universals such as god, religion or reason can no longer be utilized to
legitimate one’s arguments. We no longer have singular selves, bounded by skin and developing
through a linear progression of fixed and universal stages, that can be interpreted and understood
through the lens of an expert observer. All-encompassing theories like Marxism, psychoanalysis,
or structural-functionalism (the “bedrock” of the family and systemic therapies) are passé. The
very foundations of professions like psychotherapy or medicine are open to critical
reexamination. While postmodern theory has promoted radical challenges to the inequities of
“received wisdom,” it also perches us dangerously close to the slippery slopes of relativism,
incommensurability, uncertainty, nihilism, and solipsism (EPSTEIN, 1992b).

How are we to make sense of these postmodern theories that are flourishing all around us in
the arts and sciences? How do they affect our work as psychologists, psychotherapists, social
scientists, supervisors, and trainers? It is with these questions in mind that I will attempt to
sketch out some of the theoretical and clinical implications of the postmodern shift as I see them.

1
Published as: Epstein, E. K. (1995) The Narrative Turn: Postmodern Theory and Systemic Therapy.
Gestalt Theory, 12, 3, 171-183.
Before doing so I wish to point out my indebtedness to my colleague and friend, the late Harry
Goolishian, who is largely responsible for the development of the ideas to be presented here.
Harry’s acute awareness of the limits of our current theories combined with his ability to
challenge, with a humble and gentle determination, the sacred cows of our profession, continue to
be a source of inspiration for me.

The comments of Ludwig Wittgenstein on the role and importance of language, as well as
the emphasis a number of philosophers place on the central and problematic role of narrative
discourse in understanding the human situation (among them RICHARD RORTY, 1979; PAUL
RICOEUR, 1971; JEAN-FRANCOIS LYOTARD, 1984; HANS-GEORG GADAMER, 1989)
provide perhaps some clues to these questions. A major thesis throughout Wittgenstein’s writing
is that the limits of our language furnish the limits of our world (WITTGENSTEIN, 1953). A
constant thrust in the writings of the narrative philosophers is that the limits of our narrative
structure, our genres and stories define our ability to understand and explain. Our prevailing
narratives provide the vocabulary that sets our realities. Our destinies are opened or closed in
terms of the stories that we construct to understand our experiences.

These views of narrative and vocabulary have major implications for our work in
psychology, psychotherapy and the social sciences. Within these areas of study, according to the
narrative view, we have only our descriptions. These narrative descriptions are our
understanding of the nature of humankind. These descriptions and stories are in continuing
evolution and change. To conclude that these views of human nature are only a matter of our
descriptive vocabularies, only a matter of our language conventions, only a matter of how our
stories and narrative genres relate experience is to say that our fictions are the only nature we
know. This is a truly sobering thought!

Can it really be that what we conclude about the basic core of human nature, the things we
know about ourselves and others, what it is that we ourselves are, all reduce to being merely
functions of the language and narrative plots available to us? Are these what set the boundaries
of our sociological and psychological sciences? Can it be so that any understanding we have, all
our descriptions of the world, the very ways we observe social organization, the tools through
which we understand problems, the modes through which we do therapy are all nothing more
than expressions of our language use, our vocabularies and our stories? Even more awesome, are
the implications that our human agency, that complex set of operations through which we take
knowledgeable action in our lives and coordinate and organize ourselves with others, is nothing
more than a transformation into action of the narratives that we co-create with each other?

The narrative position provides a very firm yes to these questions. Our very selves, our
agency, our institutions, our law, our order, our very civilization are nothing more than a fictional
expression of our language use, our vocabularies, our fictions.

A few small examples: it would be impossible to think of such complex social activities
as an insanity defense or depth psychotherapy without the narrative and vocabulary of the
unconscious. Without this word to describe our behavior this and many other important rituals
and forms of social organization would be senseless. It would be impossible to think about love
the way we do, or cooperation, power or romance without the appropriate language to describe
these actions. We would not love the way we do if we did not talk about it in the way that we do.
Without the vocabulary of love it simply would be impossible to engage in a romantic
relationship. Without the language of power we could not oppress each other.

How do we come by these important vocabularies? It is necessary to understand the origins

of our narratives and vocabularies in order to understand the limits they place on ourselves and
others in all our daily activities. It would be impossible to understand deviance or to engage in
psychotherapy without some awareness of the source and extent of our prevailing narrative
understandings. The bottom line of the narrative position is the claim that our very existence, our
cultural and social practices, our institutions and rituals are all an expression of the language
games and conventions employed, a function of the narrative organization through which we
establish the vocabulary usage of human understanding. The question, “What is it that makes
this changing language and our changing narratives available to us as we live our very ordinary
daily lives?” is one of central importance to those of us who think our ourselves as social
scientists and therapists.

The mental health professions of the present century have largely been guided by a single
code of understanding, one that finds its roots in the Enlightenment and its purest form of
exposition in scientific foundationalism of the present century. Throughout the 20th century we
appear to have evolved a vocabulary and narrative that might broadly be called the age of
modernism. This narrative involves a vocabulary shift from the theme of the deep and
unfathomable unconscious, the deep, dark, and unknown interior mind of the romantic period, to
the human described more in the metaphor of a machine. It is the metaphor of a scientific
machine, i.e. a machine that is ultimately knowable, measurable, and sensitive in its totality to
external input. As an identity machine we have developed narratives of self description in such a
way that we have been transformed into beings who are consistent and have at core a deep
humanness. We are capable through this core of humanness of a deep sense of identity. This
identity is observable and knowable by ourselves and others (GERGEN, 1985).

Maladjustment for the citizen of the Enlightenment was any illogical expression.
Pathology in the romantic period was our unconscious irrationality that had overwhelmed our
consciousness. This is no longer true in the modernist period. Pathology for the modernist is the
lack of “being in touch” with our true inner identity. The humanist psychologies of Rogers,
Whitaker, Erik Erickson and Maslow are all narrative expressions of this identity theme. The
psychological vocabulary of this day is marked with words and fiction replete with the necessity
of identity, solid inner nature, and enduring characteristics. It is this enduring identity that
enables us to have commitment, love, respect, a human genuineness, and to be open with love in
our human relationships. Since this identity is knowable and measurable the modernist fiction
has also given rise to the testing and classification industry (GERGEN, 1988).

The language of family therapy, too is an expression of this modernist narrative. The
vocabulary and narrative of family therapy is rich in the lore and fiction of the family as the
cradle of our identities. The modernist narrative is a fiction that insists on the importance of
input and stimulation in order that our identities be preserved. We are nothing without the
continuing input of others. This is also the vocabulary of behaviorism. Family therapy and
behaviorism are both related fictions in the modernist story. This is a story line and vocabulary
of systems, psychic and family, and a narrative of commitment to our immediate system or for
the behaviorist, our environment.

Important in this modernist narrative is the element of the knowability of the human story.
Here the professional therapist functions as a scientist. By virtue of such activities as scientific
training, research experience, knowledge of the scientific literature, and countless hours of
systematic observation and thought within the therapeutic situation, the professional is armed
with knowledge. Our measuring instruments, our scales and tests can know us, can know our
families before we do. Our changing vocabularies not only define ourselves, but also the
appropriate therapeutic narratives through which we can find the self. They also define what is a
problem and what is the cure. The language of psychological tests, psychological and family
classification, and even the DSM IV/ICD-10 could not have flourished before the modernist
narrative that described an identity that could be discovered and measured in the interest of
mental health.
 In effect, the trained professional enters the therapeutic arena with a well-developed
narrative for which there is abundant support within the community of scientific peers. This
narrative includes explicit assumptions regarding the underlying causes of pathology, the location
of this cause within clients or their relationships, the means by which such problems can be
diagnosed, and the means by which the pathology may be eliminated.

It is this background, common to most current therapy theories, that establishes the
therapist’s posture toward the client’s narrative. Clients’ narratives, in the modernist account, are
notoriously inaccurate and unreliable. They are thus considered of limited value in understanding
the individual’s life, and far less preferable than the empirically based accounts of the trained
scientist. From this vantage point we see that the therapeutic process must inevitably result in the
slow but inevitable replacement of the client’s story with the therapist’s.

Such replacement procedures are not without certain therapeutic advantages. The client
may be furnished with an alternative narrative account suggesting alternative lines of action, thus
holding out the promise of success as opposed to the original failure account of the client. An
additional benefit is that the therapist can play the appointed role in a long-standing cultural ritual
in which the ignorant, the failing, and the weak seek counsel from the wise, superior and strong.

Yet in spite of these advantages, there are substantial shortcomings located in this
modernist option. Mental health practitioners have little justification for their claims to
knowledge of pathology and cure, especially from within the empiricist narrative. There is an
excessive focus on the individual at the expense of broader social and cultural conditions.
Further, the tendencies within these modernist narratives to pathologize and in effect, to blame
the victims for their problems, stubbornly persist (EPSTEIN, 1992a).

Over and above these problems, there are additional shortcomings to the modernist
orientation to therapy. The structure of the procedure, regardless of approach, furnishes the client
with a lesson in inferiority. Regardless of the complexity, sophistication, or value of the client’s
account, it is eventually replaced by an a priori narrative, justified by scientific claims, which is
provided by the therapist. It is not only that the client’s own reality will eventually give way to
the therapist’s, but all other interpretations will also be excluded. To the extent that the
therapist’s narrative becomes the client’s reality, and his or her actions are guided accordingly,
life options for the client are severely truncated (GERGEN, 1988). This constriction of life
possibilities is all the more problematic because it is decontextualized, cut off from the particular
social, cultural and historical circumstances of the client.

There now appears to be a shift in the contemporary stories through which human nature is
understood. We are entering the “postmodern” period. This is a period of the many variations of
philosophical constructivism. It is also a period of rapid and massive transportation,
communication, and multiple human contacts. There can be little doubt that all narratives and
narrative themes change over time. This is related not only to the process of change derived
through local discourse but perhaps more importantly to the changing challenges that we are
exposed to through our socio-historical placement.

A core theme in the postmodern fictions regarding the quintessence of humankind involves
a vocabulary that no longer privileges an objective reality. This disappearing objective reality
has many different descriptors in our daily experience, in our language and in our narrative, in
our culture and in our institutions. Note the way in which the media is increasingly described as
“creating” news as opposed to reporting it. Photorealism has given way to photoexpressionism
and Andy Warhol’s soup cans appear more real than the actual soup cans. Computer technology
has so advanced that film images may be manipulated at will and computer generated virtual
realities may soon replace various human sensory experiences. Actors and politicians become
more and more indistinguishable as actors become politicians and politicians are coached on how
to act before the camera (EPSTEIN, 1992b; GERGEN, 1991).

In a sense we have all become actors, playing an ever-expanding repertoire of roles for
different audiences. We seem to have outgrown the modernist vocabulary of the singular
knowable self and find ourselves with a new vocabulary of what KEN GERGEN (1991)
describes as our multiple selves or a state of “multiphrenia”. Our selves in the postmodern
narrative are socially constructed in the context of the increasingly varied and constantly
changing relationships in which we now find ourselves.

The changing vocabulary of our sciences is replete with doubts concerning the objectivity
of science itself. Examples of this shift may be seen in seminal works like THOMAS KUHN’S
(1970) “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, BERGER AND LUCKMANN’S (1966) “The
Social Construction of Reality”, or H.G. GADAMER’S (1989/1960) “Truth and Method”.
Within these works, the tools of measurement, the accepted organizing theories and meta theories
of science are now thought to be no more true than other descriptions or other fictions. Of
greater importance than relativized truth are matters of context and intent. In the postmodern
narrative all that is known can only be know from a perspective. Our identities are now all in
relationship to a perspective, to a point of view that is relative to our purposes
(WACHTERHAUSER, 1986).

In our field of therapy we note the rapid new use of the language of constructivism. These
new vocabularies yield a different personhood, different problems and they result in the need for
different therapies that are more in accord with the new persons we have become through our
changed narrative.

Constructivist theories of self are developed in a language and metaphor quite different
from that of the romantic and modernist periods. In the traditional views of modernism, the self
had a continuing essence that could be trusted to endure over time and to be the real characteristic
or character of a person. A healthy psychological state involved a person in touch with this inner
identity. Therapy, or at least the humanist therapies of the modernist period were geared to
achieve this condition. This is increasingly less true in our evolution to the postmodern
vocabulary.

In the views of the romantic period, we could explore an unconscious in order to restore a
sense of self. In the modernist fiction, theories of family that involve differentiation and
individuality were advanced. This is not the therapy of the postmodern fiction. Perspective,
evolving context, and change are now replacing the vocabularies of the earlier periods. Truth,
knowledge, the essence of human nature are all now subject to these changing languages and are
thus changing. We are now a product of the context of our conversations and the meanings that
we socially derive from them. Thus we are beginning to deal with a self that can be described in
an infinite variety of ways all depending on the narrative context and perspective from which we
operate. Like our changing conversation, our selves can now change in a discontinuous fashion.

This postmodern shift from a vocabulary that described an object called the self to a
vocabulary of self that describes the self as a product of changing social intercourse demands a
whole new psychology and a whole new therapy. It is now necessary to have a psychology, to
have theories of therapy, that provide us with the capacity to work in widely differing contexts.

Problems and their solutions do not spring from the soil of simple observation. Where we
locate a problem for which a solution is demanded- for example, an illness for which cure is
required- depends not so much on what is before us as behind. That is, we come to the field of
observation bearing a lifetime of cultural experience. Most important, we not only bear
languages that furnish the rationale for our looking, but also vocabularies of description and
explanation for what is observed. Thus we confront life situations with codes in hand,
forestructures of understanding which themselves suggest how we are to sort the problematic
from the precious.

Problems today are no longer a simple matter of being out of true touch with our inner
identities. Problems today are now fictions that describe a loss of flexibility. Our stories, our
narratives, our families, our social and cultural myths are now all beginning to emphasize the
need to be changeable, to be unpredictable, to be unknowable independent of a perspective or
outside of a context. (Note the popularity of chaos theory in the behavioral sciences today).
Above all the new vocabulary focuses on the requirement to be flexible. In this rapidly
advancing postmodern era we are challenged to become masters of the art of multiple self-
constructions through dialogue and discourse. We are always changing through the always
changing perspectives and the always changing communication contexts from which we gain our
multiple identities. Our changing theories and our changing therapies all reflect this evolution in
narrative, language, and vocabulary.

What are some of the consequences of this shift? What is lost, what is gained? We lose in
our changing narratives the romanticist notion of our having an inner wealth of deep and always
unchallenged resources. We lose our stable and certain moral characters as we no longer need to
struggle against our primitive and unconscious impulses. We lose the certainty of our moral
distinctions and judgments. We also lose the mysteries of wondrous love and enduring intense
romantic attachment. We lose the modernist self fictions of the human as having identity that is
consistent, knowable, enduring over time and measurable. Our modernist ability to trust and
know the consistent other is lost as we become in the postmodern world only a perspective.
From another perspective any view changes and can become ludicrous or arrogant, correct, or
whatever (GERGEN, 1991).

The narrative and vocabulary of the postmodern self promises to permit however, a
vocabulary of description that will be free of concepts of power and oppression. The postmodern
vocabulary (and therapy) is free of the need to seek truth and thus is freed of normative
descriptions that limit our capacity to work and love with the countless different others we now
live and love with and also do therapy with. In the postmodern narrative we can give up the
modernist obsession with psychic measurement, diagnosis, classification and normative
therapeutic intervention. We can in the postmodern era develop a fiction of theory and therapy
that is responsive to the rich and varied life narratives now available. These theories and therapy
are rich with descriptions of community and an emphasis on interconnection as opposed to
individualistic conceptions of free enterprise and personal autonomy. We are beginning to see a
sense of self described as interdependent and involved in changing relationships, each demanding
a different self. Our families, our personal sense of agency, romance, love, education and all
else in life are changing in these postmodern descriptive vocabularies. Our very natures are
changing with our changing postmodern fictions. In our therapy we can now give up the need for
historical and decontextualized truth, so necessary to psychoanalysis and other therapies. We are
now able to focus on features that emphasize how we now function in our constantly changing
and evolving relationships with multitudinous others.

When people seek psychotherapy they have a story to tell. Whatever its form, the therapist
confronts a narrative, and at some juncture the therapist must inevitably respond to this account,
and whatever follows within the therapeutic procedure will draw its significance in response to
this account. In the postmodern narrative, the client’s story is not simply a defective text to be
repaired or replaced by the therapist. The postmodern option abandons the notion of furnishing
reliable and scientifically based accounts of pathology and cure. The role of the therapist as
superior knower over and above the inferior client is rejected in favor of a commitment to jointly
constructed realities, collaborative contexts in which the client’s voice carries as much weight as
the therapist’s (ANDERSON & GOOLISHIAN, 1988).
 Postmodern consciousness favors a thoroughgoing relativism in expressions of identity. It
invites a multiplicity of accounts of reality, while recognizing the historically and culturally
situated contingency of each (GERGEN, 1988; RORTY, 1989). Thus for the postmodern
psychotherapist a multiplicity of self-accounts is invited, but a commitment to none. It
encourages the client(s) on the one hand, to explore a variety of means of understanding the self,
but discourages a commitment to any of these accounts as standing for the “truth of self”. In the
postmodern narrative, psychotherapy may be construed as linguistic activity in which
conversation about a problem generates the development of new meanings. The therapist and
client form a relationship, a fusion of horizons in the hermeneutic sense, to which both bring
resources and in terms of which the contours of the future may be carved.

Therapists, in this postmodern view, become masters of engaging and participating in the
process of first person story telling by the client. Insight or change becomes no more than the
transformation of historical and present selves through the telling of new stories. Change
becomes the telling of new histories and presents that are more tolerable, coherent, and
continuous with present intentions and agency. In therapy, change is the dialogical creation of
new narrative, and therefore the opening of opportunity for new agency. The transformational
power of narrative rests in its capacity to re-relate the events of our lives in the context of new
and different meaning (GOOLISHIAN, 1990).

Postmodern narrative theory allows us to see the pieces of our selves, our histories and
stories, as pieces of a puzzle. But rather than a puzzle in the romantic sense, where the matching
of the pieces would reveal deep and mysterious forces previously unknown to ourselves, or a
puzzle in the modern sense, whose optimal solution yields a singular picture of a logic-based
human machine, this postmodern puzzle may be put together in an almost limitless number of
ways. Within the postmodern view, understanding is always interpretive and there are no longer
privileged standpoints for understanding. Therapists thus are challenged to participate in
puzzling without prior or superior knowledge of how pieces should fit together.

In the postmodern sense, the pieces of the puzzles we call our selves are continually being
arranged and rearranged in response to the changing contexts of our dialogues with one another
and in accord with our purposes. Therapy in this sense is not different from the transformations
that occur in any fruitful dialogical exchange. In therapy one is only emphasizing the possibility
of the “self” narratives being something more and different than what they had been.

Said another way, we as therapists are no longer forced to “know better” than our clients
(EPSTEIN & LOOS, 1989). We are instead freed up to “not know”, indeed encouraged to use
this not knowing, this lack of a priori understanding to promote further puzzling and to hinder
premature closure of the dialogue. We do this by asking questions about the narratives such that
we enter into the subjectivity of the client. We ask questions to be informed of the continuing
narratives of the client. We ask questions from a position of curiosity and genuine interest
towards understanding that which we don’t yet know or understand. If we were to ask from the
perspective of knowing, from the perspective of our theories or from the perspective of our own
narratives of understanding, then we would in effect, demand and preconfigure the stories we
would be told.

We live in and through the narrative identities that we develop in conversation with one
another. Our professional expertise in therapy rests essentially on our ability to participate in
this dialogical process and in so doing, risk exposing our own selves to change. Therapy
requires that therapists expose themselves to the narratives of the persons they work with
(RICOEUR, 1971). By permitting the telling of the first person narratives which are the “selves”
of our clients we allow the conversational exchange that results in transformation and thus the
emergence of “new selves”. In therapy, it is the self narratives of the client that provide the
therapist with the horizons of the client’s subjectivity. It is this unfolding and continuing process
that results in the metamorphosis of “self”, “history”, and “agent”. The I and you become
reciprocally exchanged in the conversational process that we call therapy. The selves produced
in therapy become through this process, selves that can be different than before- for better or
worse.

Problems we deal with in therapy, are actions that express our human narratives in such a
way that they diminish our sense of agency and personal liberation. Problems are concerned or
alarmed objections to a state of affairs for which we are unable to define competent action
(agency) for ourselves. In this sense, problems exist in language and are unique to the narrative
contexts from which they derive their meanings (ANDERSON & GOOLISHIAN, 1990).

From a postmodern perspective, we lose our certainty not only in our ability to diagnose
and determine what is a problem, but also regarding the relevant systems for treatment. Our
questions as therapists have changed from “what/who is the problem?” and “how does the
problem relate to or serve a particular function within a particular social structure (i.e. individual,
family, etc.)?” to “what is being discussed a problem?” “by whom?” “how is it understood and
described differently by each person in conversation around this ‘problem’?” The therapy system
is thus a system that is distinguished by the evolving dialogically created narrative, “the
problem”, rather than an arbitrary social structure, such as a family (GOOLISHIAN &
ANDERSON, 1990).

Our uncertainty extends further with respect to questions regarding whom to include in
therapy sessions. Here too, there are no clear prescriptions or rules to simplify matters. Our
questions have thus changed from those that we ask among ourselves as therapists, like “how do
we get the family to come?” to questions that we ponder together with our clients such as “who
is concerned about what is being described here as a problem?” “how might it effect our
dialogues to include/exclude particular persons or to see particular persons alone or in particular
combinations?” These questions do not yield readily to singular correct answers, but are
questions which facilitate therapeutic conversation by leading the way to further questions.

Questions are the primary tool that the therapist uses to further the dialog. They always
stem from a need to know more about what has just been said. The therapist is always being
informed by the client’s stories and is always learning new language and new narrative. The
basis of such questions is not simply to interrogate the client or to gather information for
validating or supporting hypotheses. The aim is rather to allow the client to lead (or bring) the
therapist’s own horizon of understanding into question.

In this hermeneutic sense, the therapist does not apply a method of questioning, but is
continually adjusting his or her understanding to that of the other person. Thus the therapist is
always in the process of, and on the way to understanding. The therapist is led by and learns
from the expertise of the clients. The therapist’s task therefore, is not to analyze but to attempt to
understand, to understand from the changing perspective of the client’s life experience. The
therapist becomes an expert in asking questions about the stories told in therapy in a way that the
questions relate to the reasons for consultation.

From a narrative perspective, the therapist’s expertise is in the arena of creating and
maintaining space for dialog, a space in which all views may be presented and respected and
opened for examination and further exploration. Therapists in this sense, do not solve problems,
but rather through the maintenance of the dialog, enable the criss-crossing of ideas in which new
meanings are continually evolving toward the “dis-solving” of problems, and likewise the
dissolving of the therapy system as well (ANDERSON & GOOLISHIAN, 1988).

Simply put (but complex in its implications), a therapy system continues until that which
was originally talked about as a problem is no longer talked about as problematic. The
determination of success or failure of therapy no longer rests solely upon the expert opinion of
the therapist or upon some external set of objective criteria. Rather this too is locally and
intersubjectively generated from the conversations and the participants themselves.

In closing I would like to return to WITTGENSTEIN’S thesis (1953) mentioned earlier that
the limits of our language furnish the limits of our world. Our prevailing narratives provide the
vocabulary that sets our realities. Our destinies are opened or closed in terms of the stories that
we construct to understand our experiences. In therapy, interpretation, the struggle to understand,
is always a dialogue between client and therapist. In attempting to understand the client the
assumption must be made that the client has something to say, and that this something makes
narrative sense, asserts its own truth, within the context of the client’s developing story. In this
process the newly co-authored narrative understanding must be in the ordinary language of the
client. A therapeutic conversation is no more than a slowly evolving and detailed, concrete,
individual life story stimulated by the therapist’s position of not-knowing and curiosity to learn.

As we break away from the explanatory stories based on structure, measurement, and
subject-object dichotomies, we are permitted the possibility of developing cultural narratives
through a turn to an epistemology of language and meaning. This epistemology will be an
epistemology of process rather than an epistemology of structure. It may free us from the limits
of the biological, physical and cybernetic metaphors that now are our guiding fictions. It may
help free us enough to respectfully hear the stories of our clients, to value these stories enough to
slowly and carefully seek understanding for that which is not yet understood, for that which is not
yet said, and in so doing to risk expanding and changing our own horizons of understanding, or in
other words, our selves. For is that not all we can with any certainty do in our postmodern
world?

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BIOGRAPHY:

Eugene K. Epstein, PhD., born in 1955, currently works as a psychologist in the Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry of the Reinhard-Nieter-Krankenhaus in Wilhelmshaven. He is a guest
trainer for the Norddeutsches Institut für Kurzzeittherapie e.V. in Bremen and has a private
practice providing supervision and training in systemic therapy. Before moving to Germany
in 1990, he spent over six years working together with Drs. Harry Goolishian and Harlene
Anderson as faculty member of the Galveston Family Institute. He is an Approved
Supervisor of the American Association of Marital and Family Therapy and a member of the
American Family Therapy Academy.