Innovative moments and poor outcome in narrative therapy

Abstract

Aims: To analyse a poor outcome case of narrative therapy with a woman victim of intimate violence. Method: The Innovative Moments Coding System: version 1 was applied to all sessions to track the innovative moments (i-moments) in the therapeutic process. I–moments are the narrative details that occur in psychotherapeutic conversations that are outside the influence of the problematic narrative. This research aims to describe the processes involved in the stability of meanings in psychotherapy through a dialogical approach to meaning making. Findings: Contrarily to what usually occurs in good outcome cases, re-conceptualization i-moments are absent. Moreover, two specific types of i-moments emerged with higher duration: reflection and protest. Qualitative analysis showed that the potential meanings of these i-moments were surpassed by a return to the problematic narrative. Conclusion: The therapeutic stability seems to be maintained by a systematic return to the problematic narrative after the emergence of novelties. This process was referred from a dialogical perspective as a mutual in-feeding of voices, one that emerges in the i-moment and another one that supports the problematic narrative, which is maintained by an oscillation between these two types of voices during therapy.

Keywords:

• i-moments
• narrative therapy
• poor outcome case
• dialogical processes
• mutual in-feeding

Acknowledgements

This article was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), by the Grant PTDC/PSI/72846/2006 (Narrative Processes in Psychotherapy, 2007-2010) and by the PhD Grant SFRH/BD/16995/2004.

Notes

1. Cf. Santos & Gonçalves, 2009, for the dialectic perspective of Josephs and colleagues (Josephs & Valsiner, 1998; Josephs, Valsiner & Surgan, 1999) applied to i-moments.

2. See Gonçalves, Matos, and Santos (2009) for an explanation about this preference.

3. In the light of the dialogical self theory, self is understood as having several possible voices. So, identity is composed of different positions (cf. Hermans & Kempen, 1993) or voices (cf. Stiles, 1997) simultaneously.