Postmodernism, constructionism and the idea of reality: A contribution to the ‘ism’ discussions

Abstract

There has been a tendency to negate the idea of an external reality in the current systemic uses of postmodernist and social constructionist ideas. Postmodernism challenges us to abandon the modernist idea of reality, but as therapists we are still left needing to understand the social and emotional worlds which our clients inhabit. Social constructionist theory has become attractive in the attempt to advance new understandings of those realities. However, there is a critical distinction between a version of social constructionism which defines the realities of the social world as being (simply) social constructions, versus a version which uses the idea of social construction to understand how we come to know and experience the social world. Both versions are often run together in the systemic discussions, but it is the second version which allows the acknowledgment of the existence of external realities separate to our constructions of them. This paper argues that it is important to allow the space for an understanding of ‘the subject, the world and the space in‐between’ in thinking about the idea of reality in the domain of therapy.