Training Narrative Family Therapists

Introduction

The practice of family therapy supervision and training we outline supports narrative therapy’s ideological move away from 150 years of psychological, psychiatric, family therapy, and other mental health practice beliefs informed by vocabularies of individualism, humanism, and structuralism. A narrative therapy informed supervision and training practice represents an interpretive turn toward understanding the client’s identity as discursively, culturally, and relationally created.

Narrative therapy supervision in family therapy demonstrates a therapeutic practice that is coherent with a post-humanist, decentered, and relational views of identity. These theoretical/practice/political positions set out to unsettle any essentialist psychological notion of the stable autonomous person, the original author (of problem conversations or otherwise), or a given reality of what constitutes the self.

Theoretical Context

Narrative therapy supervision questions the idea of...