Rethinking Narrative Therapy: An Examination of Bilingualism and Magical Realism

Abstract

Narrative therapy is often misunderstood as offering a counter story to the dominant story and, in the process, rendering a new single account that eliminates the dominant story as an influence in the client's life. Using bilingualism and the literary genre of magical realism as analogies to rethink this practice, the author argues for the importance of holding both stories simultaneously, preserving the relationship between them. Bilingual speakers are able to cocogitate in two worlds of thought simultaneously, and magical realism authors demonstrate how to expose power differentials by inverting inequalities and undermining authorities. Such skills can be used by narrative therapists to reexamine their work and open new possibilities for clients. The article includes two illustrative therapeutic conversations.

Narratives of Psychosis, Stories of Magical Realism

“…Clients regularly present to the Family and Relationship Counselling service 2 for life or relationship issues, which involve experiences of psychological distress that disconnect them from their sense of self and safety in the world; experiences that psychiatric professionals capture within psychiatric diagnosis of mental illness, such as "bipolar disorder." This article also reflects recent practitioner interest in Magical Realism literature blended with Narrative Therapy (Polanco, 2010) and the poetically evocative post-structural philosophy of nomadic identity and experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987;Hoffman, 2008;Sandru, 2004). It is hoped that through such rambling engagements with diverse areas of thinking and writing, new ideas might unfold to conceptualize the process and content of clients' experience of their psychiatric presentations.…”

“…Her discussion of clients who are bi-and multilingual, and their subjugated voices and stories against dominant colonizing discourses is, I think, a mythic one (with references to Gabriel García Márquez's novels). What is appealing to this author and counseling practitioner is Polanco's ideas about transforming poetic memories into stories as an antidote to colonizing dominant discourses (Polanco, 2010). Uniquely, Polanco describes a use of poetics and hybridity of stories and their counter stories, notably in descriptions of bilingual and multilingual clients against the language of the dominant culture, to create new multi-subjectivities through which magical reality can be "novel-ized" (Polanco, 2010, p. 2).…”

“…To further articulate the thought, a Magical Realist listening position can draw us away from the storytelling dichotomy of dominant and subordinate story lines and, through hybridity, take us into multiple, multilayered (rhizomic) story lines, which at the same time resists a pathological colonizing of diagnosis and therapists' narratives (Polanco, 2010). The Narrative Therapy theory of developing preferred story lines as resistant to dominant story lines is a critical and profoundly effective part of narrative therapeutic maps and narrative practice.…”

More Travels with Herodotus: Tripping over Borders Lightly or “Psychiatric Imperialism”1

“…I traveled part of the way alongside Marcela Polanco's political and intellectual odyssey (Polanco & Epston, 2009: Polanco, 2010) from a chance occurrence in Havana, Cuba early in 2007 to recently learning of the reception her dissertation received at its defense at Nova Southeastern University. The conference-'Encountering the Spirit of Community in Narrative Therapy and in Cuban Social Programs' held in Havana, Cuba in January 2007-was organized by Michael Kerman (Toronto) as a 'two-way street.'…”

Autoethnographic Means to the End of a Decolonizing Translation

“…I started experimenting with new ideas, tripping over new disciplinary territories such as autoethnography, bilinguality (Polanco & Epston, 2009), translation (Kutuzova, Savelieva, & Polanco, 2008), and Latin American literary genres, in particular magical realism (Epston, 2011;Polanco, 2010;Speedy, 2008;Speedy, in press). I discovered and exploited these ideas for the renewal of my narrative practice both in my English and in my native Colombian Spanish.…”