The 6PSM - a quick introduction

This page will describe the use of the 6-Part Story Method (6PSM). It will start with a review of the development of the 6PSM from its historical roots in the morphological study of fairy tales through to the present.

The 6PSM has been described by Lahad (1992) and Lahad & Ayalon (1993) and readers should look there for a fuller description. Briefly, the technique involves helping a client to create a fictional story in six parts, and then using the story to understand more about the client's state of mind. The six parts in their usual order are:

1)A main character
2)A task or problem to be coped with
3)Things that help the character cope
4)Things that cause the character more difficulty
5)How the character copes with the task or problem
6)What happens after the problem is dealt with

The assumption is that the world-view, problems, coping strategy, relationships etc in the story can tell you something about how these things are perceived by the teller. It is a brief, simple method that can easily be accomplished within an hour's session. But it can also quickly allow people to communicate at some depth and with some subtlety, including people who are not usually seen as 'psychologically-minded'.

HISTORICAL SURVEY

The roots of the 6PSM can be traced back at least to the work of Vladimir Propp on the morphology of fairy tales. Propp's work was done in the early years of the 20th century, and his major work was published in Russian in 1928. He was interested in common themes running through the extensive canon of Russian fairy tales, and he produced a list of dramatis personae and elements that he felt were exhaustive. Although neither every actor nor every element appeared in every story, he believed that he had identified a sequence of events and characters that always appeared in a certain order. He made four observations that summarise his work (1968: 21-23):

1) Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental elements of a tale.
2) The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited.
3) The sequence of functions is always identical.
4) All fairy tales are of one type in regard to their structure.

The dramatis personae he identified were these:

• The hero
  

• The dispatcher (who gives the hero the task)
  
• The princess sought by the hero
  
• The princess' father
  
• The villain (who opposes the hero)
  
• The provider (who gives things that help the hero)
  
• The helper (who actively aids the hero)
  
• The anti-hero (who impersonates the hero or tries to steal his prize)

In reading this some premonitions of the 6PSM can already be sensed. Propp was not saying that every story had exactly these eight characters; in any story the villain and the anti-hero might be the same person, and the dispatcher may also be the provider for example. But he maintained that all these functions were played out in every Russian fairy tale he analysed.

French structuralists and semioticians took great interest in Propp's work, starting with Tesniere (1959) who looked at the dramatis personae and came up with the concept of the actant. He defined actants as:

"&ldots;beings or things that participate in the process (of the story) in any way whatsoever, even as mere walk-on parts or in the most passive way."

This helpful definition moves the focus wider than just people. Tesniere makes it clear that animals and even inanimate objects can be actants; for example a story about a prisoner in a cell seems only to have one actor, the prisoner struggling for freedom. But there are two actants; the cell that confines the prisoner is just as much a part of the story as the prisoner him or herself.

Subsequently Greimas (1966) used Tesniere's concept of actants to codify Propp's dramatis personae, simplifying them into a system of six actants. A sender gives some task (known as the object) to the subject of the story. The subject receives help from some quarters and opposition from others, but eventually succeeds in their task to the benefit of some third party - the receiver.

Greimas considered that this structure might describe all stories, not just Propp's large but circumscribed body of fairy stories. The core of the story is the subject-object pair, or what might be seen as the hero and their task. As an example Greimas suggested what the 'story' told by Marxist ideology might look like. A more current example is also given in the table below. Now the shape of the 6PSM becomes even more recognisable, particularly if the helper and opponent are seen as parts three and four respectively of the 6PSM:

The work of Greimas and others such as Genette (1980) were well-known to Alida Gersie, a Dutch dramatherapist based in the UK since the 1980s. At that time she used an adaptation of Greimas's 6-part structure to develop a therapeutic storymaking structure that she called the Story-Evocation Technique (SET). This was not an assessment method, but a means of getting clients to create stories, the very production of which would be therapeutic. The SET method has not been published, but led on to other work such as that described in Gersie & King (1990). At this time Gersie was in contact with Mooli Lahad and Ofra Ayalon in both the UK and Israel, and they took on the method with their client groups. Ayalon was working therapeutically with children and adolescents.

The SET structure had between seven and nine parts, but was reduced to six when Lahad and Ayalon used it as the basis for the 6PSM. This was devised in response to the need for a projective assessment tool to help clients identify preferred coping mechanisms. It was developed in the context of the school system in the northern Galilee region of Israel, which was under constant threat of bombing, shelling and other attacks at that time. The idea, described in Lahad & Ayalon (1993), was that the six elements described in the introduction would evoke a story about successful coping.

This would then be analysed by the BASIC Ph system, to identify preferred coping strategies based in the domains of beliefs, affect, social, imagination, cognition and physicality.

From the 1990s onwards Mooli Lahad returned periodically from Israel to the UK to teach, and brought back the newly modified 6PSM to a new generation of practitioners, among them myself and my colleague Mary Dunn. She was developing a new psychotherapy service for people with personality disorders, based in the UK's National Health Service and described in Dunn & Parry (1997).

The 6PSM is now widely used in Israel in settings such as:

• Paediatric Oncology
  

• Nurse training
  
• Personnel selection
  
• Disaster response
  
• Survivors of child sexual abuse

It is well known to Dramatherapists in the UK and USA but is not widely known to other professions. Nor has it been the subject of any published research into its psychometric properties. For example, can two people reach agreement on the significance of a 6-part story and can their agreement be measured and repeated? Do two separate stories produced by the same person show stable underlying features, regardless of differences in surface content? Can the 6PSM allow a clinician to make valid inferences about the mental health or personality style of the person who wrote it? These are the questions I am attempting to answer in my research.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunn, M., & Parry, G. (1997). A formulated care plan approach to caring for people with borderline personality disorder in a community mental health service setting. Clinical Psychology Forum, 104(June), 19-22.

Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse (J. E. Lewin, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Gersie, A., & King, N. (1990). Storymaking in Education and Therapy. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, Ltd.

Greimas, A. J. (1966). Sémantique Structurale : Recherche de Méthode. Paris: Larousse.

Lahad, M. (1992). Storymaking in assessment method for coping with stress. In S. Jennings (Ed.), Dramatherapy Theory and Practice II (pp. 150-163). London: Routledge.

Lahad, M., & Ayalon, O. (1993). BASIC Ph - The story of coping resources, Community Stress Prevention (Vol. II). Kiryat Shmona, Israel: Community Stress Prevention Centre.

Propp, V. I. (1968). Morphology of the Folktale (L. A. Wagner, Trans. 2nd revised ed.). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Tesnière, L. (1959). Eléments de Syntaxe Structurale. Paris: C. Klinksieck.