Magical realist pathways into and under the psychotherapeutic imaginary

Abstract

My experience of people's life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people's daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the literatures of counselling. In this paper I speculate about the possible reasons for ‘smoothing’ magical realities into rational realist accounts within the literature of counselling. I tell short stories that illustrate people's magical/realist manoeuvres out of impossible life circumstances towards different possibilities. I argue that just as writers on the margins have subversively written themselves into different spaces, people at the social and psychological margins have found imaginative pathways around life's walls.

Keywords:

• magical realism
• counselling
• narrative inquiry
• subversive texts
• imaginary
• border crossings

Notes

1. A term coined by New Zealand narrative therapist Johnella Bird to describe the kind of listening needed to uncover the points of entry to stories from people's everyday lives that have hitherto gone unnoticed.

2. A mainstream American TV series, 1997–2002, in which elements of magical and surreality are routinely interspersed with ordinary and everyday life in a Boston law firm.

3. Foucault (1988), p. 9), when interviewed about ‘the technologies of the self’, spoke of a human need to ‘to think otherwise than we thought’ and that the ‘main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning’.

4. Although permission to quote their stories has been granted by all participants in this study, all their names have been changed and identifying features disguised.