JCNT - May 2025 Release - Full Release - Flipbook - Page 7
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between coherence and heterogeneity as alternatives to representational fixity.
We can move between the actual and virtual, recognizable and surprising, or from
clients' histories to the unimaginable.
Years ago, Bennington College's interdisciplinary curriculum fed my desire to
cross-pollinate ideas from different referential frames. Now, art provides new
perspectives on the underlying philosophies of narrative therapy. Michael White
has asked us to question the "reproduction of the dominant culture" in our
counseling practices (Bubenzer et al., 1994, p. 74). Art can move beyond these
replications to create handmade and novel encounters. We can defy conventional
categories and identity descriptions that impose order and certainty at the
expense of unforeseen connections and aberrant outcomes. The antirepresentational philosophies of Deleuze encourage me to actualize difference
from a world of immanence and to turn away from inherited concepts. Nonrepresentations are thoughts without images that escape presuppositions and
recognizable forms. This aesthetic understanding can remind narrative therapists
that the goal is not to establish standardized, stable identities, but to elicit
practices that revitalize our engagement. Artmaking deepens our grasp of process
over product, and movement over structure. As Deleuze (1995) writes, "Becoming
isn't part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however
recent, that one leaves behind in order to 'become,' that is, to create something
new" (p. 171).
David Pare and Jeff Zimmerman have augmented my ideas of the interdisciplinary
and handmade when it comes to narrative approaches. David Pare (2001)
identifies counseling as a discourse and invites us to consider how we position
ourselves in the "conceptual frameworks" of our counseling practices (p. 2).
Pare's ideas prompted me to reflect on how our visions for narrative relate to our
worldviews. Although narrative therapy has synthesized various influences, what
we perceive as possible is often determined by a "univocal tradition," which leads
to a rejection of the "both/and" that could invite meaning from "multiple
contexts" (Pare, 2001, pp. 1-8). Jeff Zimmerman (2023) writes of the dangers of
