Welcome to the 21st WCP Virtual Congress Program Scheduling

While relatively new, the narrative paradigm is exponentially growing. It arises from key philosophers, including Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Vilosinov, Vygotsky, and more contemporary figures of Rom Harre and John Shotter. Story is the unit of study and is grounded in neuroscience in which stories are the most efficient mode of information storage and retrieval, accomplished through the default mode network, or “story brain.” Narratives include plot, value, characters, obstacles, villains, audience, tone, and more. Each person lives a meta-story which is the result of all the stories they have heard and which shapes their identity. This perspective permits a bridging with indigenous cultures in sharing foundational assumptions, such as an emphasis on defective stories and environment-story mismatch rather than defective people. We will examine the use of stories in psychotherapy, change, and transformation, using Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as one example and the Native American Church (NAC) as another. Giving and receiving testimony is paramount for many forms of healing. Positive stories offset more destructive stories as people learn to see themselves as characters in a story, which allows them to step back and examine the plot, their roles, and the like. We will briefly demonstrate techniques used within narrative psychiatry for maximizing the impact of therapeutic stories, for using images through words, and for beneficially utilizing metaphors for therapeutic change. We will review some outcome studies that used a narrative approach including our study of the beneficial effects of gathering a life story on chronic pain and on the doctor-patient relationship.