Ethical issues in moral and social enhancement

6.3.3.
 
Narrative disorganisation
One of the most common themes in narrative psychology explains pathology in 
terms of narrative disorganisation, with therapy being aimed at increasing narrative 
coherence (Angus and McLeod, 2004). Narratives explicitly expressed during 
psychotherapy can be seen as a reflection of covert, meaning-making psychological 

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structures, while disorganised and incoherent narratives are symptomatic of a 
psychological problem. One illuminating example of psychological research 
concerning consistency of narratives has been done by Dimaggio and Semerari 
(2001; 2004)
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. On the basis of therapy transcripts, they develop criteria that 
distinguish ‘effective’ from ‘ineffective’ narratives, resulting in a typology of what 
they call ‘pathological narratives’. ‘Ineffective’ narratives are divided into 1) 
impoverished narratives, which fail to incorporate important aspects of lived 
experience into the client’s life story, and 2) disorganized narratives, which fail to 
meaningfully integrate lived experience, thus failing to provide a sense of 
coherence, continuity and meaning. Each of the two types of ineffective narratives 
is further divided into subtypes.
Examples 
of disorganised narratives 
include basic integration deficit 
(unintentionally incongruent emotion, affect, verbal expression, posture), 
overproduction of narrative content coupled with a deficit in hierarchization, and a 
deficit in integration between multiple self-other representation (e.g. extremely 
incompatible representations of others held intermittently or simultaneously). For 
the purpose of the argument let us focus on the latter. I will examine the deficit in 
integration between multiple self-other representations in light of Ricoeur’s 
monological/homophonic structure criterion for a narrative, as contrasted with more 
than one authorial voice.