More on Narrative Therapy

04/07/99
With all this talk on Narrative Therapy, let me refer you to Andrew Lock's work on this topic.
It will introduce and summarize White's theories in a way you may well find useful. It will also put a
face on them, as Lock begins his summary with a photograph of Michael White.
Click here to go to Lock's website on White.

In appreciation of: Karl Tomm

04/07/99
Karl Tomm has done a lot to popularize Michael White's and David's Epston's version of Narrative
Therapy. Tomm told us of his story of inspiration with Narrative Therapy when he wrote the foreword
for White and Epston's key text, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. In that foreword, Tomm said

Since encountering their work three years ago, my own therapeutic methods have
changed enormously. Because of the new trail they have broken, I have been able
to enter into some entirely new domains of practice. Needless to say, this has
been extremely gratifying both profesionally and personally. Many of my friends
and colleagues are having similar experiences.
Tomm, p.vii
What was so inspiring to Tomm? I think he explained that best in a frequently cited, but not very
available paper that he gave before a conference in 1989 - the year before Narrative Means to
Therapeutic Ends was published.
This paper previewed Narrative Therapy philosophy and helped to launch this new movement within
family therapy. (You can see my paraphrase of this paper here). Basically, it seemed to Tomm, that
Narrative Therapy could use language to eradicate the problem, almost to "exorcise" it, and it would
leave clients less likely to need to defend themselves and blame others. Blame would be cast, it
seemed to him at that time, on abstract externalized entities.
In these words in 1989 and 1990, Tomm seems completely taken by Narrative Therapy.
By 1993, we begin to see a little shift in his writing. He is still very inspired by White and the
Narrative model of therapy, but he is now more openly eclectic and he distinguishes his own approach
from that of Michael White's in several ways.
By 1993, after a few years working within the Narrative Therapy paradigm, Tomm is reporting on his
differences with some aspects of White's approach to therapy. Tomm notices that Narrative Therapy
seems too monologic. The new preferred story that the client takes from Narrative Therapy (as she
reauthors her life), feels a bit too pat, too removed the client's lived experience for Tomm. He wants to
hear more what has happened and make the new, preferred story less important in the therapy
conversation. Talking about his own form of therapy, and distinguishing it from White's, Tomm says:

I focus on enabling persons to bring forth coherent descriptions of experience that

have theapeutic potential. ...Perhaps one difference between us lies in my
tendency to place more emphasis on lived experience than on stories about that
experience.
Tomm, p.74/75
He seems less inspired with the central idea of Narrative Therapy, the creation of a re-authored
monologic narrative, and has become more interested in the dialogic nature of "our stories."
Comparing his own work with White's, he says that he, Tomm, is

less invested in the narrative metaphor than Michael [White]. In my work, I

give more priority to conversations than to stories.
Tomm, p.75
And Tomm, by 1993, even has a kind of dialogic model of the mind (much like Bakhtin), apparently.
Tomm tells us:

I regard a personal story as a concatenation of internalized conversations and find

that the complexity of a full story renders it more distant from experience than a
conversation that may be a component of the story. Furthermore, for me as a
physician, it is going a bit too far to suggest that lives are constituted by stories
and to say that "stories provide the structure of life."
Tomm, p.75
Thus, we see, the evolution of Tomm's own independent voice emrging from his own eclecticism. He
still seems to be someone who continues to admire and respect the work of Michael White.
Nevertheless, he finds ways to to be eclectic with White's theories. He harvests one thing from White's
model, and rejects another. For another example, he notes that while White bases his work on
Foucault, his own work, Tomm says, is based on Maturana. In Tomm's words:

My own personal intersets have drawn me to Maturana (rather than Foucault) as a

theoretical resource. Maturana's perspective seems less pessimistic than
Foucault's; however, in many respects they are quite compatible.
Tomm, p.77
Thus, Tomm shows us his path of rethinking Narrative Therapy for himself. To my mind this is the
paralogical growth of Tomm's perspective.
It is, I believe, only in the marketing of any theory that it stands still in the consumer's mind. Consider
how drastically Freud's theory changed over the forty years he wrote. How could any intelligent writer
continue in the same unchanged, unimproved theory of things?
Living theories are continuously under revision, even as we discuss them, even as we encounter each
new case.
The challenge is, it seems to me, how to stand on the shoulders of a good theorist like Michael White.
Is it shameless of us to harvest what we see as the best in the crop of his ideas? And to weave these
good ideas into the paralogical growth of our own thinking? Or do we owe something to a teacher to
preserve his ideas in their original form?
I see that question as perhaps the biggest one of all. Unless we can find new ways to use ideas for our
own eclectic growth, in the end, postmodernism will be reduced to just another school of thought.
What it has to teach us that is most precious is this ability that Tomm has shown, the ability to cherish
one set of ideas but to change them in ways that seem promising with remarkable irreverence.
I much admire Tomm's ability to learn from White, and to honor that learning, while, at the same time,
to explore his own thinking and to honor the wisdom of his own voice.