Dethroning the Suppressed Voice: Unpacking Experience as Story

Dethroning the Suppressed Voice: Unpacking Experience as Story

In this chapter, I will problematize the conceptualization of experience as it is often taken up in modernist therapeutic practices. Doing so will include taking apart routinized assumptions in practice that naturalize emotions and that privilege, authorize, and decontextualize clients' experiences, separating them from their social construction. Drawing on the work of Joan Scott (1992) and Dorothy Smith (1990, 1999), experience is interrogated, as is subsequently the privileging of the suppressed voice in therapeutic practice. Within this work, experience is an interpretation that needs interpretation (Scott, 1992). It is argued that the suppressed or disqualified voice is located within dominant social stories—it does not escape the social—and thus it must, like all other stories, be unpacked. If we wish to move beyond the limitations of subjectivism in which the individual is seen to be independent of the social world, experience must be taken up in narrative work as fully social.

Narrative therapy emphasizes the resurrection of the suppressed voice, bringing into view disqualified knowledge (White, 2001). Externalizing internalized dominant discourse often allows for suppressed or subjugated knowledge to emerge. However, along with White (1997, 2001), I will argue that resurrecting the suppressed voice is not the discovery of the real, unencumbered self. As such, it should not be privileged as natural or as providing [Page 178]an authoritative foundation. Suppressed stories or subjugated stories are not inherently more true than those that reflect dominant knowledge. All aspects of stories require unpacking for individuals to determine a preferred way of being in the world. While narrative therapy encourages individuals to embrace a preferred identity, we need to remember such preferences do not exist outside the influence of culture. As such, choice exists within the opportunities and constraints of culture and cannot be individualized (Butler, 1993; Foucault, 1991, 1995). It is not, therefore, only the harmful or negative stories that narrative therapy must take apart. White (1997, 2001) reminds us of the importance of unpacking both positive and negative accounts of identity, as neither are evidence of the “real self.” Both the dominant and subjugated knowledge within experience stories are socially constructed, and, indeed, the existence of one story tends to rely upon the existence of the other (Foucault, 1980). Thus, while clients' preferred realities are privileged in reconstructing or re-authoring identities, these preferred realities should not be naturalized any more than unhelpful stories should. I will argue in this chapter that therapeutic reflexivity must extend beyond the resurrection of the suppressed voice in order to dethrone the suppressed voice itself from naturalized positions that privilege it as self-legitimizing. Postmodern narrative therapy will then need to hold on to the tension between accepting and rejecting aspects of experience (Brown, 1994, 2001, 2003).