The therapist's challenge is to help people see themselves as able to choose to behave differently while recognizing both the limits of fate and the opportunities for change.  The narrative that fosters this change I will call "the story of destiny."  It is a narrative that shows links between past, present and future, and I propose, that these stories of the past contain not only the future possibilities but also the seeds of the change we seek to make.  This means that the ability to change oneself emerges not just from stories of mastery, power, and agency, but according to stories of destiny.  I will try to explain and illustrate with examples from therapy.

Fate, Chance and Human Agency

Think of fate is the rigid, inescapable aspect of a person's life that constrains the future.  It yields a sense of doom and helplessness.  There is this sense of fate in many great novels.  Fate is also a concept that informs our understanding of our personal lives.

But not only fate is important.  We also have a sense of "chance."  Chance is the surprising unexpected twist in time.

Now, ask yourself this: Is change a result of fate or chance?  Often change is portrayed as a  chance 'disontinuity in time' (Boscolo  Bertrando, 1992), that lifts us out of the script of fate.  But I think this portrayal does injustice to the duality of our thought about change.  Change can also seen as a connection of the future to the past and even to fate. 

A Literary Perspective

When people come to therapy they express a sense of fate but they also express a desire to create a new story for themselves, "to break free of the repetitions that prevent change."  And as therapists, we want our clients to have a sense of control, a sense of being able to act differently.  But the ability to act differently requires appreciation of both fate and chance.  These two concepts exist together, although hiding one another, first hiding chance, then hiding fate.  They exist in a fluctuation created by differAnce, but  "[f]ate and agency stand side by side.

The Fall of Chance/Fate as Destiny

Derrida teaches us that writing has the power to repress this duality of meaning that hides in differAnce and makes the world seem flat and unambiguous.  Literature is deconstructive, however, because it can show this duality of meaning.    "Nonetheless deconstruction is not about the collapse of binary thought [dichotomies] but a footnote to its simultaneous collapse and re-emerging ad infinitim in the process of life" (p.553)  Deconstruction finds traces of that repressed meaning in the text so that the "metaphysical opposition waivers.  It looks for words that oscillate, that have double meanings..." (Brogan, 1989, p.23).  "Such terms inscribe differAnce within themselves, they are always dfferent from themselves, they always defer any singular grasp of their meaning' (Derrida, 1981, p.100).  They reflect life as does literature, where there is always a play or irony of meanings." (p.553)

Chance is Fate

Derrida (1984) gives the word "chance" as an example of a word that oscillates.  it is usually opposed to 'fate'. 

Destiny

The term "destiny" is similar to the term "fate", but destiny affirms human dignity and fate crushes it.  Destiny, "paradoxically, entails 'living at once freely and as one must' (Tinder, 1981, p.34).  Fate is imposed on us while destiny is "what we forge in life" (p.554).  "When a family comes to see a therapist, the outcome involves  an element of chance and an element of fate." (p.554).  Coming to see a therapist has possibilities for the family's destiny.

The Alien Fate

Jim was an 8 year old boy with a history of neglect and deprivation who had come to live in a new home  --  his pictures told the story of his earlier life and his life now in his new home.  Through his therapy, his drawings marked a trail that his family and I could use to follow in the process of his therapy.  Through the years he grew and developed a gentle manner.

Narrative as Destiny

Ricoeur (1980), tells us that a narrative recounts what happens in human time in a way that pulls together events to give a whole story (Ricoeur, 1984).  A major ingredient of this story is repetition.  To narrate is to take these events and unify them in time and show their meaning.  Our past and future become bound together.  "Narrative bestows unity, meaning and coherence on lived experience." (p.556).  In this paper I present narrative "as the unified story of a person's fate and destiny, an unfolding of his or her life events in time."  Therapy articulates this narrative in its accounts of how things have been, how they have changed and how they remain the same.  "Narrative is the story of how ...fate and chance fall together [to create one's] destiny." (p.557)

The Past is Future

This paper asks how we can treat past history in a way that assists the therapy.  The story of the past "helps us to articulate and understand the present problem, so as to allow action towards another future." (557).  Earlier events are linked in the story to later events and change is the point where past, present and future meet.  "The past narrative is affirmed as the key to the future" (p.558).  Narration unifies experience.  It does  not fragment it [as the postmoderns would propose happens in postmodernity.]

The Tyrant

I had a 5-year-old little girl client whose presenting problem was encropresis.  Over a course of six sessions, over 3 months, the problem seemed to have been entirely solved.  I asked them to tell me what happened.  In that narrative, the mother explained that she had been hospitalized as schizophrenic and was labeled as "violent" and, as a result, she had become afraid of being violent towards Debbie.  Her therapy, not only with me, had enabled her, however, to feel more in control and I was able to help write a new text, or story, accounting for this change.  "Personal agency evolved from the old narrative like a phoenix from its ashes." (559)  The new narrative was a thread that connected the past with their future destiny.

Social (De)Constructions: Self and Agency

As discursive beings, people create meaning in their lives by interpreting each other's words in conversation.  I agree with Harre (1995, p.369), however, that the ultimate ontological unit is not the language community but the individual person. 

The question in my mind is how people become one person (take up one narrative) rather than another.  In part the answer to this question surely has to do with the context of the person.  "The dialogical self has a personal identity developed in relation to others." (560).  We are not, however, in control of the contexts in which we live, but we, nevertheless, have the power to exercise choice over how we position the self in conversation.  The self is our ability to assume a particular language script in conversation. Sometimes people coming into therapy have created a self without agency.  They talk as if they are victims to fate.   Narrative throws out fate (Derrida, 1987, p.72) and resplaces it with agency and destiny.

The Deconstructing Self

Social constructionists such as Sampson (1989) often mention Derrida's idea that the centered self has been  "deconstructed".  However, we know that Derrida thinks that the centered self is not deconstructed simply by the reversal of focus from self to other.  Such a reversal leaves us trapped in modernist metaphysics.  For the self to be deconstructed in Derrida's sense, something else is required.

By its concern with oppression and relationships, postmodernism has shifted the focus from the self to the other.  This is not Derrida's philosophy.  Derrida pictures the deconstruction of the centered self  as being in a continuous moving back and forth between self and other - not as a moving beyond.  For Derrida, the deconstructed self-other phenomenon is created by the chain of meaning in our ongoing converasation which continuously generates and revises the boundary between between self and other.  What is today self is tomorrow other and vice versa.  "It is you that are at fault here," someone tells us, "or perhaps it is me".

In spite of this language based understanding of the deconstructed self, recently, Derrida has called for recognition of the ethical and political subject (Larner, 1997).  This is a call away from the deconstructed self.  It is a post-deconstructed self.  In this new writing, Derrida tells us he believes that unless we revise our experience of self and make it centered we will have no rapport with the other.  He states that if we do not think of the other as another self, we will not see the other as separate from ourself.  We cannot be ethical to others, he tells us, unless we can make the distinction between you and me. This respect for difference between self and other is necessary for an ethical relationship to emerge from our conversation.

Again, the call to responsibility is not a call to deconstruct the centered self.  Rather, it is a post-deconstruction call to establish the centered self in order to be be responsible to others.  This leaves the self problematic in Derrida's ethics.The self is not liquidated; it is revised so that it becomes centered.  This results in a reworking of the notion and experience self.  The post-deconstructive self does not arise randomly as an arbitrary  product of conversation but is created by that conversation which produces the division between self and other.  For this to happen, the text we create in conversation is seen as attached to the author.  We are not anonymous in this post-deconstructive conversation.  Our meaning is tied to our being particular people creating these passages. 

This post-deconstructive centered self is an existential self in Sartre's sense.  This self-construction is not merely a the passive result of our having a life story to tell. This new self constructs itself with agency. 

Such a centered post-deconstructive self  is quite able to reflect on its inner experience, its body, dreams, emotions and so on, and to doubt their reality.  It can do this because this sense of a centeredness emerges and revises itself through conversation with others.  It says things like, "Perhaps this is me" and, "no, I think this is you."

Derrida is suggesting, then, that for the sense of personal agency to emerge we must see ourselves as individuals relating.  This does not destroy the collective.  We are both selves and collective. And our selfhood exists not only in relationship to others but in the moments in which we are alone engaging in in introspection, self-reflection and internal dialogue.  In fact, this ongoing internal conversation lays down the groundwork (in a semiotic process) for our agency and ethics.In other words, relational selves in postmodern culture may not be as dispersed, fragmented or 'saturated' (Gergen, 1991) as we think.  Even socially constructed narratives express an individual identity and destiny that allow us to be persons and have a unified life story. 

Derrida, therefore, is now painting a picture of the self that is in accord with Harre's (1995) less radical social constructionism.  This individual self may be restricted to the 'core language games' concerned with morality related to our bodies.  But here, at least, there is repetition and stability in our personalities and experience and this centeredness exists amidst change and difference.

And, so, this post-deconstructed  self is both centred and dispersed -- and all of this takes place within a narrative of destiny..

Therapy, Technology and Time

In pre-modernity, the world was ruled by fate.  In modernity people began to believe that the world was ruled by chance and probability.  With narrative, we create a sense of destiny.  In this paper, I wish to argue for a metaphor between narrative destiny and the chance of science.  But we must not forget the past.  The future must come to terms with the past because the past sets the context for meaning in the future.  Our narrative destiny requires that we respect the past. 

This means, we must resist the temptation to present the client with better stories (p.565).  "There are powerful constraints on narrative change.  We cannot construct the future however we please.  A postmodern narrative therapy risks becoming a new technology for change, if it is beholden to the modernist agenda to conquer fate and become masters of our own destiny."  (565)

Falling into Change As Other

For Nietzsche, our only hope is to learn to embrace the past that has made us who we are and learn to appreciate how we are "thrown  into situations over which we have little say or control."  "As John Lennon put it: 'Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans.'" (p.565)   And so "our lives are both chosen and unchosen..."  (p.565).  There are limits to the agency of therapists who try to "re-author people's lives.  Problems cannot be simply excised from personal histories in time at the will of either client or therapist.  Change has its own timetable ..."  And it is so for any system of therapy " (e.g., psychoanalysis, cognitive behaviourism) read from this deconstructive perspective.  Any therapy is about opening up a person to his or her own destiny, bringing on the future as it is already contained in the past..." (566)

In therapy, change is what happens between theory and practice, between chance and fate.

Conclusions

"A therapeutic narrative opens up the past to the future, chance to fate, showing how one is connected to or finds meaning in the otehr.  It suggests that the past makes sense, is to be found in the future, that what has been is revealed in what is to come.  What I think we therapists need to do is to be open to the poetic possibilities for change.  Change, it seems to me, is a "precious and blessed event.  I no longer look for a connection between our converastion and their changing.  And yet a connection there may be..." (567)  "All I know is that the flow of talk is around me.  I see and hear the crying, laughing, asking, suffering and the questions that come and go.  Where my interest is in all of this I do not know.  Do I want or desire to change anyone or am I just curious, like a child haering a fairy story in half-disblief and wonder that such things happen in people's lives?" (567)

References

Boscolo, L. & Bertrando, P. (1992).  The reflexive loop of past, present, and future in systemic therapy and consultation.  Family Process, 31, 119-130.

Brogan, W.  (1989).  Plato's Pharmakon: Between two repetitions.  In H. J. Silverman (Ed.)  Derrda and Deconstruction. In H. J.Silverman (Ed.)  Derrida and deconstruction.  London/New YUork: Routledge.

Derrida, J. (1981).  Positions.  Chicaago, IL: Uniersity of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1984). My chances.  In J. H. Smith & W. Kerrigan (Eds.). Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature.  Baltimore, MD/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Derrida, J. (1987)  The postcard:; From Socrates to Freud and beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, Il: The University of Chicago Press.

Derrida, J. (1988),  The politics of friendshi.  Journal of Philosophy, 85(11), 632-644.

Derrida, J. (1991). 'Eating well': An interview.  In E. Cadava, P. Connor, & J. L. Nancy (Eds.), Who comes after the subject? London/ New York: Routledge.

Gergen, K. (1991).  The saturated self.  new York: Basic Books.

Harre, R. (1995). The necessity of personhood as embodied being.  Theory & Psychology, 5, 369-373.

Larner, G. (1994). para-modern family therapy: Deconstructing post-postmodernism.  The Australian and New Zealand Journal fo Family Therapy, 15, 11-16.

Larner, G. (1997). Derrida and the deconstruction of power as context and topic in therapy.  In I. Parker (Ed.) Deconstructing psychotherapy.  London: Sage.

Ricoeur, P. (1980). Narrative time.  Critical Inquiry, 7, 169-190.

Ricoeur, P.(1984). Time and narrative (Vol.1). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Sampson, E. E. (1989b). The deconstruction of the self.  In J. Shotter & K. J. Gergen (Eds.), Texts of identity. London: Sage.

Smith, R. (1995). Derrida and autobiography.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tinder, G. (1981).  Against fate: An essay on personal dignity.  Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Wiley, N. (1994).  The semiotic self. Cambridge: Polity press.