Law, Freedom, and Story: The Role of Narrative in Therapy

Earle H. Waugh worked at the Humanities Centre of the University of Alberta.

In a day of increasing specialization, when even scholars within disciplines find it difficult to find a common language, Hoffman sets out to show that the captivating qualities of narrative bridge impossible chasms. Drawing on John Dominic Crossan’s New Testament Studies, and Victor Turner’s notion of liminality, he tries to demonstrate that the process of storytelling, especially what he calls the “mytho-parabolic character” of that experience, can unite New Testament criticism, psychotherapy, sociology, and theology. His ultimate goal is to open up a new kind of theology, called the transnomic. Such a goal is necessary because he finds the old theologies too bound by limiting parameters.

This study of narrative is certainly one of the most promising to appear on the scene in the last decade. But whether new ideology focusing on process can escape the deadening hand of structure is by no means clear from his book. Even the language Hoffman uses to build his case would seem implicitly to define the reality he aims at. Hoffman apparently cannot escape the givens of his own story.