Narratives of Psychosis, Stories of Magical Realism

Abstract

This article extends an invitation to therapists and counseling practitioners to explore the qualities of the literary technique and genre of Magical Realism as a conceptual and therapeutic space to listen to clients' detailed stories of acute psychotic episodes and other expressions of mental illness. The author will briefly situate some current therapeutic practices that respond to clients' psychosis and support self-agency in psychiatric treatments, while at the same time recognizing that conversations about psychotic content are not often attended to by practitioners. The author, a counseling practitioner oriented to post-structural therapies, mainly Narrative Therapy, introduces and develops the idea of a Magical Realist listening space for clients to safely explore psychotic content for non-pathologizing therapeutic meaning making. Woven into the primary thread of this article is a further invitation to find philosophical resonance for therapeutic practice by extending thinking and reflection about practice into and beyond post-structural philosophies. This conversation specifically engages with the post-structuralism philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) and their ideas of the rhizome and nomadic conceptions of identity in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (and other of their works). Client conversations are introduced as examples of where reality and the magical merge in narratives of psychosis.