Book Review. Hope for Law: Narrative Therapy and Intimate Abuse Practice. A Review of Narrative Therapy in Practice: The Archaeology of Hope edited by Gerald Monk, John Winslade, Kathie Crocket, and David Epston. Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA (1997), 320pp.
✍ Scribed by Linda G. Mills
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 112 KB
- Volume
- 16
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0735-3936
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Leila is a 24 year old Maori 1 woman who had been hospitalized by Dr. Glen Simblett, a psychiatrist, in New Zealand. Leila had been hallucinating. Dr. Simblett felt that her psychotic episodes had become so life threatening that she needed hospitalization. While hospitalized, she stopped talking, eating, and drinking. Against medical advice, she refused treatment. Ultimately, she checked herself out of the hospital to see a tohunga (a Maori healer). Leila described her story as follows:
Tigers have 9 lives. It lost its ®rst life in the family it was born in because of their abuse and punishment. It lost its second life to drugs and alcohol. She [sic] lost her third life in a marriage where there was no room for her hopes and ideas. She lost her last life when she was admitted to a psychiatric unit. She hasn't got many lives left now (p. 122).
Dr. Simblett is a psychiatrist practising Narrative Therapy in New Zealand. Leila was, in part, the inspiration for Dr. Simblett's commitment to Narrative Therapy and to a psychiatric practice that is sensitive to the cultural, ®nancial, and gendered subtexts of emotional breakdown and to their narratives, as the clients themselves embrace them.
Leila's story is part of an edited volume titled Narrative Therapy in Practice: The Archaeology of Hope. The book is a fascinating collection of therapy practicebased essays written by New Zealand counselors engaged in a form of therapeutic practice called Narrative Therapy. Narrative Therapy develops a postmodern method of counseling which relies on both therapist and client narratives for de®ning the presenting problem and for proposing solutions. The book presents essays on both the theory and practice of Narrative Therapy, a method which has now been adopted by postmodern therapists who practice in all parts of the world. The ®rst four chapters of the book describe the theory and method of Narrative Therapy, and the last six chapters present its application in a number of practice