Sophie's World

This paper uses the families in Jostein Gaarder's (1996) novel, Sophie's World to examine two marriage and family therapy theories (narrative therapy and intergenerational family therapy) found in Diane R. Gehart and Amy R. Tuttle's (2003) Theory-Based Treatment Planning for Marriage and Family Therapists and theory-based treatment planning as outlined in Dorothy Stroh Becvar and Raphael J. Becvar's (2003) Family Therapy. It relates these therapeutic approaches to two philosophies discussed in the novel, Romantic philosophy and existential philosophy. While the novel focuses on providing an elementary introduction to the history of philosophy, the dual heroines of the book and their parallel families offer fascinating case studies of two marriages and two families in need of therapeutic help.

Sophie Amundsen is 14 years old, just about to turn 15. She is an only child, living in an isolated house on the edge of a suburb near the woods with her working mother. Her father, the captain of an oil tanker, spends much of his time at sea. Sophie is a latchkey child, walking home after school each day with her friend Joanna to a house usually inhabited only by her pets. Sophie turns out to be the fictional invention of the absent father of another girl, Hilde Moller Knag, who is just one day older and who also lives in an isolated house with a mother who is preoccupied with her work and a father who spends much of his time out of town. While neither case is of a family in r

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res existentialist philosophy, and this, too, provides useful perspectives for narrative therapy. Gaarder (1996) defines existentialism as "a collective term for several philosophical currents that take man's existential situation as their point of departure" (p. 455). Irvin D. Yalom (1980) describes the existential way of looking at the world by observing that: An apprehension of one's finiteness can often catalyze a major inner shift of perspective, that it is the relationship that heals, that patients are tormented by choice, that a therapist must catalyze a patient's "will" to act, and that the majority of patients are bedeviled by a lack of meaning in their lives (p. 5). In the course of exploring her story, Sophie comes to question her own existence, and this existential exploration provides her with an intriguing way to try to decide who she is and how her family conflicts might be resolved. More importantly, from an existential perspective, Hilde, reading the narrative her father has constructed, begins to seek the catalyst for her own will. This begins to encourage her to take charge of her own life, moving herself beyond the construct of the narrative her father has constructed for her. Another useful thera

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