Self-Narratives: The Construction of Meaning in Psychotherapy

Abstract

Assessing the Integration of the Self Self-Narratives: The Construction of Meaning in Psychotherapy Hubert J. M. Hermans and Els Hermans-Jansen. New York: Guilford Press, 305 pp., $40.00 (hardback). Hubert Hermans and Els Hermans-Jansen have written a practical and creative guide to instruct psychotherapists about self-narratives-stories that people tell about significant events in their lives-and how they can be used as the source of understanding client's experiences and guiding the counseling process. The authors have expertly integrated theory, methodology and clinical application based on the assumptions that (a) people actively create meaning of their own and other's behavior and (b) that psychotherapy is a collaborative effort to reconstruct unhealthy patterns of thinking and behavior in more adaptive ways. The authors note that clients' narratives provide organization for the ongoing, complex events in their lives with each event being influenced by preceding events and influencing following ones. They also point out that the context of events is by definition a social context. Consequently, the thoughts, feelings, and actions of any person can only be understood in relationship to relevant others who are coconstructing reality in often unpredictable ways. Furthermore, because so much social information is not directly knowable, individuals create and guess about much of what is uncertain. And when a person is faced with change-particularly unexpected change-he or she spontaneously imagines possible plots, rehearses potential dialogues, and organizes thematic events and emotions that are consistent with his or her stories of the past, present, and future. The authors assume that the content of these cognitive constructions exerts a significant influence on subsequent events, feelings, and beliefs. Based on these assumptions about narratives, the authors' suggest that the self may be conceived of as "an organized process of valuations." In the authors words, this valuation process emphasizes ... the historical nature of human experience and implies a spatiotemporal orientation: A person lives in the present and is therefore oriented from a specific point in time and space to the past and to the future. The organizational aspect emphasizes that the person, by orienting to different aspects of his or her spatiotemporal situation and through self-reflection, creates a composite whole in which experiences are differentially weighted, (p. 14) A valuation is anything people identify as a relevant meaning unit accompanied by varying degrees of positive (pleasant), negative (unpleasant), or ambivalent (both pleasant and unpleasant emotion. It is essentially the goal of the clienttherapist interaction to discover how the relevant meaning units are organized (for example, more influential to less influential) and evaluate the affective consequences of the present configuration of valuations. Hermans and Hermans-Jansen have developed a systematic constructivist method for client self-exploration-the Self-Confrontation Method. Clients are asked to respond to a few straightforward questions about persons, experiences, or circumstances in the past, present, and future that are a source of significant influence on them. A series of valuations are then constructed in the client's own words (with the assistance of the therapist). For each valuation, the client is asked to rate the relevance of 16 adjectives high to low which theoretically reflect four domains of self valuation: (1) self-enhancement, (2) attachment to others, (3) positive affect, and (4) negative affect. The therapist then asks for "general" and "ideal" ratings on the adjectives. Once these steps are taken, an assessment of what the authors term the "manifest" level of self-functioning has been completed. The therapist then summarizes the information by organizing a matrix with each valuation listed, followed by scores on self-enhancement, relevance of others, positive affect, and negative affect. …