Inside Jacob’s story: exploring counsellor contribution to narrative co-construction using imaginary dialogues with a Biblical character!
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Date
29/11/2016Author
Talbert, Linda Louise
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Abstract
Psychotherapeutic practice often involves the telling and retelling of a client’s stories
of life in collaborative, meaning-making dialogue with a counsellor. This study
demonstrates and explores the dynamics of counsellor contribution to this narrative
co-construction, particularly the ways in which the counsellor’s inner conversations,
reflexivity and interpretive style may emerge in practice and have an influence on the
client’s understanding, re-evaluation and cohering of his or her own story. The
multi-voiced, multi-layered intersubjective space and time in which this kind of
narrative collaboration takes place is a difficult area to access for study but one
whose potential impact on the client should make it the focus of respectful, ethical
monitoring and careful reflective practice. Using phenomenological theories of
reader-response and dialogical play, my research sets up an analogy between the way
a reader might reflexively interact with life story episodes in a written text and the
ways a counsellor might listen to and interpret a client’s stories of life over the course
of a counselling contract. My project uses a comprehensive and episode-rich story of
a life, the iconic ‘womb to tomb’ story of Jacob in the book of Genesis. My own
hearer/reader response to the story gives rise to the creation of a set of imaginary
dialogues between two interlocutors, Jacob as an elderly client reviewing his life
story and myself as counsellor, listening to his stories of life. This methodology is
used as a means to access an in vivo lived experience, as it might unfold in practice,
of my counsellor contribution to Jacob’s story and the interplay of voices and
standpoints which characterise it. Attention is drawn to the inchoate, but deeply
human, intersubjective aspects of narrative co-construction as a process and the value
of this form of reflective practice to surface actual praxis experience for analysis.
Insights surfaced by this reader-response methodology point to the significant extent
to which the hermeneutical standpoints and dialogical voices of a counsellor are
actively involved and implicated in narrative co-construction.