Narration Analysis

The analysis of narratives, which are discussed in various thematic contexts in the subject and social sciences as well as cultural studies and find practical application in adjacent fields, is outlined in this chapter with a particular focus on clinical or psychotherapeutic uses. Narration is treated as self-constitution, communicative practice, and representational work on an imaginative stage. The narrative (self-)thematisation in the context of illness, conflict, and psychotherapy is reconstructed conversation analytically and interaction analytically, is secondly embedded in the systematics of the analysis of scene and staging, and thirdly is the subject of dramaturgical analysis. The dramaturgical approach to narration in psychotherapy is presented as an example; here, the tension between narrative dynamics and psychodynamics is also made evident.