Structural Differentiation as a Precondition for Meaning-Making in Psychotherapy: A Process-Level Approach Using Narrative Configurations

Constructivist and dialogical approaches to psychotherapy emphasize the central role of meaning-making in the organization of experience, often through the negotiation of tensions between differing positions. These approaches, however, typically presuppose that the structure of the dilemma is sufficiently differentiated to allow such processes to occur, a condition not always present in clinical practice. Clients may experience concerns as urgent and meaningful while remaining unable to organize them into a form that can be engaged within a shared formulation, resulting in therapeutic work that remains focused on content without achieving structural clarification. This paper proposes structured narrative framing as a process for facilitating structural differentiation. Using culturally familiar fictional narrative figures as pre-differentiated configurations, patterns of conflict can be externalized. Three clinical vignettes illustrate shifts from repetitive evaluation toward structural recognition. Therapeutic impasse may thus reflect the absence of sufficiently differentiated structure. Implications are discussed for collaborative case formulation and constructivist psychotherapy.