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Inside Jacob’s story: Exploring counsellor contribution to narrative co-construction using imaginary dialogues with a Biblical character! ! ! ! Linda Louise Talbert! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! PhD Counselling and Psychotherapy! University of Edinburgh! April 2016" TABLE OF CONTENTS! Declaration i Acknowledgments ii Abstract iii Lay Summary v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Background and Ethos for the ! Research Approach 8 ! Origins: How did I find my way to this research? 8 !Essential Emphases 10 !Ethical Concerns 12 Chapter 2: Locating the Research in an Interdisciplinary! Landscape 15 ! Counselling Research Context: Where does it fit? 15 !!Accessing the Co-constructed Space 17 !!Fictive Narrative Means to Co-constructed Ends 19 ! Cross-disciplinary Context: Connections and Examples 21 !!Links Between Literature and Psychology 22 !!Links Between Biblical Text, Literature ! !! and Psychotherapy 27 ! Therapeutic Practice Context: What Am I Doing with Jacob? 34 !!Reminiscence and Life Review 37 Chapter 3: Establishing the ! Epistemological/Methodological Ground 42 ! Phenomenological Hermeneutics 42 ! Gadamer 45 ! Ricoeur 49 ! Iser and Reader-Response Theory 53 ! Bakhtin and Buber: Voices in Dialogue 57 Chapter 4: Methods in Practice 61 Chapter 5: Introductory Orientation to the Iterations 68 Chapter 6: Pre-Research Iteration 73 ! Introduction 73 ! Imaginary Dialogue 78 ! Commentary 91 Chapter 7: Iteration One 101 ! Introduction 101 !Imaginary Dialogue 109 !Commentary 125 Chapter 8: Iteration Two 159 ! Introduction 159 !Imaginary Dialogue 180 !Commentary 196 Chapter 9: Iteration Three 223 !Introduction 223 !Imaginary Dialogue 242 !Commentary 255 Chapter 10: Iteration Four 271 ! Introduction 271 !Imaginary Dialogue 293 !Commentary 309 !!Imaginary Dialogue with Supervisor 310 Epilogue 337 Conclusions 346 References 360 Appendices 379 ! Appendix One: Jacob’s Family Tree 379 !Appendix Two: Jacob’s Life Story Episodes 380 !Appendix Three: Time Line of Jacob’s Life 384 !Appendix Four: Rebekah’s Letter 386 ! ! DECLARATION! ! ! This thesis has been composed by me, is my own work and has not been submitted !for any other degree or professional qualification. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !Signed: ……………………………………………….. ! Date: …………………………………………………. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! #i ! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS! ! I gratefully acknowledge the support of the following people without whom the study and completion of this thesis would not have been possible: ! To my supervisors: Mr. Seamus Prior, Dr Alette Willis and Dr David Reimer. For providing a rich and resonant lived experience of reader response and co- construction. Your very wise voices, in dialogue with me and with each other informed every step of this project. To my husband, Tom, who has patiently listened to me read out loud every single word of my many draft manuscripts. Your steadfast support, encouragement, and faith have made all the difference. To my children and grandchildren for believing I could do it, never complaining about how long it took and frequently providing expert tech support. To David and Sonja, (who read my tears and started me on this road), Sue, Paul and Dagmar for their insightful and helpful readings of the final draft. To many other friends and work colleagues who gave me space and time to finish this project, who asked good questions and whose eyes seldom ever glazed over at my answers. To my co-participant, Jacob and his El Shaddai who opened a door, invited me in, and gave me a voice. We wrote the story together and are writing it still. …………… This thesis is dedicated to Dr. and Mrs David Lay and Dr. and Mrs. Steven Lay, whose family legacy of integrity, generosity and enduring faith have inspired me for nearly half a century. ! #ii ! ABSTRACT ! Psychotherapeutic practice often involves the telling and retelling of a client’s stories of life in collaborative, meaning-making dialogue with a counsellor. This study demonstrates and explores the dynamics of counsellor contribution to this narrative co-construction, particularly the ways in which the counsellor’s inner conversations, reflexivity and interpretive style may emerge in practice and have an influence on the client’s understanding, re-evaluation and cohering of his or her own story. The multi-voiced, multi-layered intersubjective space and time in which this kind of narrative collaboration takes place is a difficult area to access for study but one whose potential impact on the client should make it the focus of respectful, ethical monitoring and careful reflective practice. Using phenomenological theories of reader-response and dialogical play, my research sets up an analogy between the way a reader might reflexively interact with life story episodes in a written text and the ways a counsellor might listen to and interpret a client’s stories of life over the course of a counselling contract. My project uses a comprehensive and episode-rich story of a life, the iconic ‘womb to tomb’ story of Jacob in the book of Genesis. My own hearer/reader response to the story gives rise to the creation of a set of imaginary dialogues between two interlocutors, Jacob as an elderly client reviewing his life story and myself as counsellor, listening to his stories of life. This methodology is used as a means to access an in vivo lived experience, as it might unfold in practice, of my counsellor contribution to Jacob’s story and the interplay of voices and standpoints which characterise it. Attention is drawn to the inchoate, but deeply #iii human, intersubjective aspects of narrative co-construction as a process and the value of this form of reflective practice to surface actual praxis experience for analysis. Insights surfaced by this reader-response methodology point to the significant extent to which the hermeneutical standpoints and dialogical voices of a counsellor are actively involved and implicated in narrative co-construction. ! Key Words: phenomenological hermeneutics, Biblical hermeneutics, Gadamer, Ricoeur, interdisciplinary research, narrative gerontology #iv ! LAY SUMMARY! Something deeply collaborative happens when a client and counsellor work together on what are perceived by the client as problematic parts of his or her life story. New understandings, re-evaluations, alterations and re-storying of significant life episodes are often the result of clients telling their stories and counsellors hearing and responding to them in new ways. What the counsellor’s contributions to this process are and how these spoken or unspoken responses manifest themselves are important to investigate for the impact they may have on a client’s experience of therapy, particularly on how she or he chooses to understand and narrate her or his own stories of life. My research provides an active model for exploring the counsellor’s side of this collaborative conversation; first, by using the more familiar relationship between a reader and a text as a means to simulate what it is like to be ‘inside’ another’s life story, listening to its themes and episodes as they unfold over time. The story chosen for this kind of readerly attention is the life of Jacob as recorded in the ancient book of Genesis. This story is a comprehensive account of a life, from ‘womb to tomb,’ full of the kind of familial, environmental, social and cultural issues that, though distanced by antiquity, still resonate with the kind of struggles any client may experience and bring to therapy. The second way in which this research seeks to evoke the counsellor’s side of this joint collaborative process is to use the creation of imaginary dialogues between myself as a counsellor and Jacob as an elderly client engaging in a review of his life. Using what Jacob’s story elicits for me as a reader and my own experience of counselling practice, these imaginary dialogues and my analyses of them give insight into the ways a counsellor may contribute to this profoundly human process of being inside a client’s story of life. #v The-story-of-a-life as told to a particular person is in some deep sense a joint product of the teller and the told. Jerome Bruner (1990:124) ! ! Introduction! ! Something deeply collaborative happens when human beings meet as teller and told in the stories of life. My title for this research investigation implies an intention to be the ‘particular person’ who goes inside the story-of-a-life, hears it ‘as told’ and engages with it from a counsellor’s praxis-based point of view. My chosen teller of the tale is a Biblical character named Jacob, whose long and eventful life story is drawn from the book of Genesis. Engaging with his story throughout this project is characterised not just by hearing,