Woolfe, R., Strawbridge, S., Douglas, B. & Dryden, W. (2009). Handbook of Counselling Psychology, 3.ed. London: SAGE.  Del I, II og IV.

Cultural psychology sees narratives as the building block of the mind.

Social-constructivist suggests that our experiences of identity is formed by our actions and joint activities with others – surface phenomenon’s; behaviour, language, relations and interaction, rather than a inner core self. Specially the language is used to express the self through narratives.

Constructionists are interested in narratives and focuses on the interrelation between narratives, the discourse and the symbolic resources in a culture, the social performance and the function of a narrative, and how new narratives are produces through joint actions rather than the individual’s own formation of meaning.

Whites narrative approach to therapy:

– Externalising conversations; to make the problem something external from the client and let the reference to it be external.

– Re-authoring conversation; the idea of a writerly text, where the therapist can point out missing links in the story, and where the client and therapist together can fill these out with new meaning.

– Re-membering conversations; we see us self through others, but some people are more significant than others. The therapist tries to point out these significant people with the client and change their meaning or to emphasize other peoples meaning for the clients self perception.

– Counter-documentation and definitional ceremonies; the audience for the narrative that the client creates also has a meaning. It can be expressed by the therapist as an audience that creates counter-documentation, like letters or notes or by a witness.

Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (ZPD) can be used by the therapist to try to get the client to fill out missing links in their narratives by adapt the level of difficulty to the client’s condition.

Narratives uses pictures, metaphors and social functions and is not only told through verbal tellings.