Narrative and Psychotherapy—The Phenomenology of Healing

In recent years, there has been mounting pressure for the various schools and techniques of psychotherapy to demonstrate their effectiveness empirically. Numerous empirical studies, often ingenious, have been conducted for this purpose. Many of these studies have been misguided, in my opinion, by attempting to operationalize qualities of the therapist, or an abstract psychotherapeutic process, rather than being able to address change as the patient or client experiences it. The present paper offers a way of thinking about change in the patient undergoing psychotherapy in terms of his or her subjective experience of a change of meaning during narrative acts. This requires turning to a tradition of thought in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychosomatic medicine that is more philosophical; this is a tradition which has been largely confined to the German language, the tradition, namely, of phenomenological-anthropological and existential psychiatry.