journal_august_2026_release_full_edition - Flipbook - Page 10
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What Is a Good Question—and What Does It Do? A Forty-Year Reflection on
Inquiry in Narrative Therapy
David Epston
This paper is based on David Epston9s keynote address delivered at the 2025
Contemporary Narrative Therapy Conference in San Diego, California.
Part I: Inquiry, or the asking of questions
Inquiry, or the asking of questions, to my way of thinking, is the primary
instrument for our work. If a scalpel might be said to be essential to the work of a
surgeon, should considerable care be given to whether such an instrument is
sharp or blunt? A dull scalpel would have serious consequences & it would tear
flesh, wounding and scarring. Compare a scalpel with a keen edge, which would
do less harm and lead to a far quicker recovery. In the same way, we must assume
responsibility for our questions in that any response to them is mediated by the
question itself. I believe it is predictable that a dull question will likely invite a dull
answer; a heartless question will likely invite a disheartened answer; a poetic or
metaphorical question will likely lead to a poetic or metaphorical response; and
what I intend to speak at greater length today is that an imaginative question will
be responded to in an imaginative way. It just might find a way that hasn9t been
taken before to what Michael referred to as 8the not yet known9.
As well, I believe our questions disclose—whether we like it or not—how we are
endeavouring to 8understand9 the other. Some questions, as you know, are asked
for their own administrative or diagnostic purposes. Such questions are often
prescribed and even manualized. They are fixed and require very little of us other
than to utter them audibly. In fact, such questions have nowhere to go other than
where they have gone before. Unsurprisingly, asking such questions is devoid of
the excitement of what might lie ahead and is a pale imitation of a lively
encounter. In fact, in such pre-scripted and prescriptive inquiries, it would be an
What Is a Good Question—and What Does It Do? A Forty-Year Reflection on Inquiry in Narrative Therapy
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, August 2026 Release, p. 9-45.
www.journalcnt.com
