Captain, we've got blinkings and beepings!

The word "narrative" seems to be popping up a lot in my life lately.

Firstly, there's of course the fact that I'm reading the The Science of Discworld series, which is all about how the Discworld runs on Narrativium (and magic) while Roundworld runs on rules. I'm about a hundred pages into the second book and I love how they explain that humans seem to think our world runs on narrativium as well. The best example of this is, I thought, was actually from the first book, where they told about how humans refused to believe a theory about the evolution of stick insects couldn't be right because it didn't make any sense, from a narrative point of view. From an actually evolutionary point of view it doesn't have to make sense, of course, since evolution is, when you get right down to it, random.

Secondly, to stay in the spirit of fiction, for some reason Neil Gaiman's term 'story-shaped' has been popping up in my head a lot lately. I'll need to reread Fragile Things to make sure I get it right, but a quick google search told me that he feels he "is trapped between the chaos of dreams and the desire to experience life as always already 'story-shaped'".

Thirdly, in my therapy classes a lot of attention is being given to creating a narrative representation of your client, though no one seems to be able to give me straight answer as to why we should do this. I think I have the answer though, but I'm coming at it from a philosophy point of view. Another thing that's my therapy professors give a lot of attention to is how exactly to know what to say to your client. In client-centered therapy we are told we should look for common themes and then focus attention on this as something problematic. In psychodynamic therapy we are told to absorb what the client tells us, process it in a non-rational manner and return it as an interpretation. Notice that these two techniques are basically the same.

Lastly, and now I'll also explain what I meant above, this is something I've been thinking for some time. In philosophy, writers often try to communicate an idea that is really not suitable for communication by language. So what they do is they give lots of examples and metaphors until the reader understand what is really meant, without the writer ever explicitly writing it down. I think this is what is really supposed to happen in therapy as well. Humans are complicated, and the better you get to know them, the more complicated they become. At the most extreme point, you are the person you know best, and it's impossible to communicate who you are, what is at the core of 'you'. But it is possible to get a good idea of this through narratives. If you listen to a client and reshape the chaos of their story into a decent narrative (well, several), eventually it will be possible to transcend those narratives and reach an understanding that cannot be expressed in words. (Then there is of course the problem that every understanding can only be a misunderstanding since it can never truly do justice to the other person, but lets not go there. I think that in therapy this problem is circumvented because the client himself will add that extra bit of understanding and it's not so bad that you, the therapist, can never achieve it.)

In all honestly, this process happens all the time. It's how you create a mental image of everyone you know. If nothing else, this is a nice example of how critical thought can turn something natural and intuitive into something really complicated. Personally, I think it's worth the effort to turn an unconscious process into something that can be thought about by simply offering the words to express it in.