Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

6.3.2.
 
Deficient and dissolving narratives 
Not all perceiving, talking and thinking about internal and external events is 
narration. Ricoeur’s account places constraints on what can count as a narrative, 
and therefore constrains what can serve as the basis of self-understanding. Starting 
out with Aristotelian rules of composition, Ricoeur (1984, 1985) emphasises the 
importance of structural unity and wholeness of the story, temporal unification, 
homophony (single, unified authorial consciousness), monological structure, and 
privileging the plot over the character, action or thoughts. If those criteria are not 
fulfilled we might be faced with a description, a dream sequence, a dialogue, a 
failed attempt at a narrative etc., but not a functioning narrative. A similar idea – 
the idea of narrative disorganisation – is present in narrative approaches to 
psychotherapy. In examining Ricoeur’s approach, the following sections will 

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employ some ideas and examples from narrative psychotherapy in order to make 
the possible application of the view apparent.
Before proceeding, it is important to note that there are several ways in which 
narrative approaches can be incorporated into therapeutic practice. Psychotherapists 
might perform text analysis of session recordings or homework exercises, focus on 
examining narratives of events and life narratives to identify main issues or 
problematic thought patterns, use therapeutic journaling about distressing life 
events as a means of reducing their impact (Pennebaker, 1997), use storytelling in 
order to facilitate shifts in the patient’s construction of a problem (Blagov and 
Singer 2004), and so on. However, I’d like to focus on strongly narrative 
approaches which use not only some of the tools or insights of narrative theories, 
but rather build on the central tenets of narrative theories.
What is the goal of the kind of psychotherapy that is strongly rooted in a narrative 
psychological approach? On Ricoeur’s view, the goal of psychotherapy would 
include not just increasing behaviours or interpretations conducive to wellbeing, but 
rather focus on facilitating the process of narration, strengthening the ability to 
‘challenge change’ (self-constancy) and producing narratively informed life plans. 
The implication for the aim of therapy is that it is conceptualized in terms of 
promoting narrative organization. Consistent with this, in psychological narrative 
terms, psychotherapy is conceptualized as a linguistic practice of narrative 
articulation and reconstruction (McLeod, 2004). In narrative approaches to therapy, 
psychological difficulties are often seen as a reflection of ‘pathological narratives.’ 
According to Avdi and Goergaca (2007), ‘pathological narratives’ are seen as self-
narratives that do not sufficiently represent vital aspects of lived experience, and 
therapy is conceptualized as a process of ‘story repair’, where problematic self-
narratives are reconstructed to become more coherent, complex and inclusive.