Narrative Therapy: Making Meaning, Making Lives offers a comprehensive introduction to and critique of narrative therapy and its theories. This edited volume introduces students to the history and theory of narrative therapy. Authors Catrina Brown and Tod Augusta-Scott situate this approach to theory and practice within the context of various feminist, post-modern and critical theories. Through the presentation of case studies, Narrative Therapy: Making Meaning, Making Lives shows how this narrative-oriented theory can be applied in the client-therapist experience. Many important therapeutic situations (abuse, addictions, eating disorders, and more) are addressed from the narrative perspective. Rooted in social constructionism, and emerging initially from family therapy, narrative therapy emphasizes the idea that we live storied lives. Within this approach, the editors and contributors seek to show how we make sense of our lives and experiences by ascribing meaning through stories which themselves arise within social conversations and culturally available discourses. Our stories don’t simply represent us or mirror lived events; they actually constitute us—shaping our lives as well as our relationships. Narrative Therapy will be a valuable supplemental textbook for theory and practice courses in departments of Counseling and Psychotherapy and of Social Work as well as for courses in Gender and Women Studies. --- from the publisher Reviews: "This book addresses so many of my unsettled questions at the narrative/ postmodern crossroads. The book is like an outstretched hand that arrived to take me from the edge of my thinking and invite me to venture a few steps further toward clarity and complexity. I found the book overall to be a mind-stretching invitation to turn up the volume on our reflexivity. It read like narrative theory to the second power (narrative X narrative) which offers expanded opportunities to be curious, multi-storied, and reflective — but also political and deconstructive." -- Susie Snyder "Blending modernist and postmodernist approaches, the contributors offer a variety of case studies that apply narrative therapy to a wide range of problems." -- SciTech Book News Contents: Acknowledgments Introduction: Postmodernism, Reflexivity, and Narrative Therapy
Catrina Brown, Tod Augusta-Scott PART I: WRITING IN THE SOCIAL
Ch 1. Situating Knowledge and Power in the Therapeutic Alliance
Catrina Brown
Ch 2. Re-storying Women's Depression: A Material-Discursive Approach
Michelle N. Lafrance, Janet M. Stoppard
Ch 3. The Blinding Power of Genetics: Manufacturing and Privatizing Stories of Eating Disorders
Karin Jasper
Ch 4. Poetics of Resistance: Compassionate Practice in Substance Misuse Therapy
Colin James Sanders
Ch 5. Practicing Psychiatry Through a Narrative Lens: Working With Children, Youth, and Families
Normand Carrey PART II: SELF-SURVEILLANCE: NORMALIZING PRACTICES OF SELF
Ch 6. Discipline and Desire: Regulating the Body/Self
Catrina Brown
Ch 7. Watching the Other Watch: A Social Location of Problems
Stephen Madigan
Ch 8. Internalized Homophobia: Lessons From the Mobius Strip
Glenda M. Russell PART III: CHALLENGING ESSENTIALISM
Ch 9. Dethroning the Suppressed Voice: Unpacking Experience as Story
Catrina Brown
Ch 10.Conversations With Men About Women's Violence: Ending Men's Violence by Challenging Gender Essentialism
Tod Augusta-Scott
Ch 11. Challenging Essentialist Anti-Oppressive Discourse: Uniting Against Racism and Sexism
Tod Augusta-Scott PART IV: RE-AUTHORING PREFERRED IDENTITIES
Ch 12. Movement of Identities: A Map for Therapeutic Conversations About Trauma
Jim Duvall, Laura Beres
Ch 13. Letters From Prison: Re-authoring Identity With Men Who Have Perpetrated Sexual Violence
Tod Augusta-Scott
Ch 14: Talking Body Talk: Blending Narrative and Feminist Approaches to Therapy
Catrina Brown About the Editors About the Contributors | 
