Self-narrative reconstruction in psychotherapy: Looking at different levels of narrative development

This commentary focuses on Cross's (2010, this issue) work as an opportunity to elaborate upon how to study narrative-dialogical processes from the perspective of complexity. We start by elaborating on the notion that narrative development is a multidimensional activity that extends through several organizational levels and on the limitations of conventional research methods for narrative analysis. Following this, we focus on our experience of research on narrative change in psychotherapy in order to exemplify this point. From our perspective, clients' problematic self-narratives can be challenged by the emergence of innovative ways of thinking and behaving that the client narrates during the therapeutic conversation (innovative moments or i-moments). Our results suggest that the reconstruction of a person's self-narrative depends on the structure of relations between i-moments, rather than on the mere accumulation of i-moments. Therefore, we are particularly interested in looking at how clusters of i-moments create a pattern, which we call protonarrative. We are interested in the dynamic processes between former self-narrative, i-moments, protonarratives and new emergent self-narratives. Hence, we have developed a research strategy that allows tracking these different levels of narrative development in psychotherapy. In the remaining of our commentary we will briefly present our research strategy.
This article was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), by Grant PTDC/PSI/72846/2006 (Narrative Processes in Psychotherapy, 2007–2010) and by PhD Grants SFRH/BD/46189/2008 and SFRH/BD/48266/2008.
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