NARRATIVE PROCESSES IN PSYCHOTHERAPY

The concept of narrative, its various definitions and its role in the process of meaning construction in psychotherapy is reviewed. Despite the current theoretical interest in this area, we lack a shared unders tanding of what the term narrative refers to in the context of the the rapy session. To address this problem, the term narrative processes is coined to incorporate the conceptual and experiential strategies whic h lead to the construction and reconstruction of stories. The Narrativ e Processes Coding System (NPCS), a systematic method of unitizing the rapy text is described. The NPCS is a two step process which enables r aters to a) reliably subdivide therapy session transcripts into topic segments according to thematic content shifts, and b) further subdivid e and characterize these topic segments in terms of three narrative pr ocess codes i) external description of events (actual or imagined), ii ) subjective/experiential description, and iii) reflexive analysis of current, past and/or future events. The findings from a pilot study us ing the NPCS are reported and implications and future applications of the NPCS as a generic method for unitizing and characterizing therapy text are discussed.