Red Sistémica · Family therapy
The new interventions. New narrative methods in family therapy
Starting from a dialogue in Don Quixote – that of the galley slave who is writing his autobiography and cannot finish it as long as his life is not finished – Ricardo Ramos sets out the two challenges of narrative therapy: the impossibility of a complete personal story, which requires moving from the exhaustive story to the sufficient story, and the problem of enunciation, which makes narrating an act addressed to someone rather than an expression. From this he draws a reading of postmodernity in which what counts is no longer the truthfulness of a version, but its relevance.
Editor’s note
Red Sistémica publishes this text under the title “Fragment”: it is an excerpt from a longer article, the full version of which appeared in Perspectivas Sistémicas, no. 89. We translate here the excerpt as it was republished.
“Narrating is an act, not an expression; it is not the relating of events, it is the event of relating events.”
Ricardo Ramos
The sufficient story
In the course of his adventures in La Mancha, Don Quixote makes the acquaintance of a galley slave with literary ambitions named Ginés de Pasamonte, the author of a picaresque autobiography which, in the firm conviction of that colourful character, would eclipse the Lazarillo.
– And what is the book called? asked Don Quixote.
– The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte, the man replied.
– And is it finished? asked Don Quixote.
– How can it be finished, he replied, if my life is not finished yet?
This quotation from Don Quixote sets out the first challenge that narrative therapy has to confront: the impossibility of a complete personal story. One cannot aspire to a complete story, neither of the person, nor of the problems, nor of the intersection of the two; because people’s lives are going to continue and the future of problems cannot be predicted.
The complete, exhaustive story required by the consultative option (McNamee and Gergen, 1992) – knowing exactly what happened, in order to be able to prescribe with full knowledge what should be done – must give way to the sufficient story, which is always sufficient for now, for the moment, if nothing gets complicated; and with which what one can hope for is that the problems (and the people) change enough for one to be able to go on living with them (and, for people, by themselves). Or, in the words of Anderson and Goolishian (1988): “problems are not solved; they are dissolved”.
The problem of enunciation
But the quotation from Don Quixote is not from Don Quixote. It is the quotation of a quotation. It comes from the prologue – curiously entitled “Prologue about the end” – of a book devoted to the theme of “the end of the novel”, by an author who is Spanish this time: Mario Kunz (1997).
And it is here in order to bring up the second problem that narrative therapy confronts: the problem of enunciation. Narrating is an act, not an expression; it is not the relating of events, it is the event of relating events. And this is not done in order to draw the portrait of an author, but in order to captivate an audience; to win it over, to make it do something that, however vaguely, it is in our interest that it should do (Ramos, 2001).
Thus one does not narrate how and what one wants, but how and what one can; it is the conditions of production of the discourse (WHO have I managed to become for you, so as to be able to tell you WHAT – Pêcheux, 1969), and not expressive necessity, or the updating of the personal narrative or of the world view, that account for what ends up being told to us.
Local knowledge and relevance
The quotation from Don Quixote above is universal and was there to impress. The quotation of the quotation from Don Quixote, for its part, was for the initiated. It was there to bring forward local knowledge, the knowledge available only to those in the know (of an uncommon text in this case, of a particular situation in another), indigenous knowledge, the knowledge of “the one who is in on it”.
For what is remarkable about postmodernism is not that “anything goes”; it is that, given the contingent character of any version whatsoever, what must prevail is not the truthfulness of one over the other, but the relevance of one rather than the others, given what, at each moment, we have in hand.
In the social world, there is no place for the position of observer (and therefore for the objective distance on which “truth” is founded), but only for that of actor – even if a reflexive actor.
Key takeaway
Two shifts structure the narrative clinic as Ricardo Ramos presents it here. First, giving up the exhaustive story for the sufficient story: sufficient for the moment, and sufficient for life to go on with the problems. Second, holding the account to be an addressed act: what gets told depends on what the narrator has managed to become for his interlocutor, not on a need for expression. Hence the criterion that replaces truth: not which of the versions is true, but which one is relevant here and now.
Who is Ricardo Ramos
Dr Ramos is a psychiatrist and family therapist, consultant physician at Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona, supervisor, teacher and professor of the master’s degree in family therapy of the Family Therapy School of Sant Pau Hospital, and coordinator of the Laboratory of Human Communication of that hospital’s Psychotherapy Unit. He is the author of the book Narraciones vividas, narraciones contadas (Paidós).
Note from the original
(*) This article is a reproduction of the original published in no. 12/13 of Redes, June 2004. The full text appeared in Perspectivas Sistémicas, no. 89.
This article is an English translation of “Las nuevas intervenciones. Nuevos métodos narrativos en terapia familiar”, published by Red Sistémica (first published in Redes, n° 12/13, juin 2004). Translated and republished with the journal’s permission.
Read the original articleHow to cite this article
Ramos, R. (2022). The new interventions. New narrative methods in family therapy (Complexe Systémique, Trans.). Complexe Systémique. https://app.complexe-systemique.com/en_GB/articles/the-new-interventions-new-narrative-methods-in-family-therapy (Original work published in 2004 in Redes, n° 12/13, juin 2004; republished in 2022 by Red Sistémica, https://redsistemica.ar/2022/08/01/las-nuevas-intervenciones-nuevos-metodos-narrativos-en-terapia-familiar/)
To go further
- Narrative therapiesThe principles and tools of the narrative current, whose epistemological foundations Ramos discusses here.
- The art of asking narrative questionsHow questioning shapes the story that gets told, the central issue of the problem of enunciation.
- The movement that revolutionized therapy: social constructionism and narrative therapiesThe postmodern context from which Anderson, Goolishian, McNamee and Gergen, called upon in this text, come.
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