The paper explores issues of fate, chance, time, agency and destiny in therapy. The theoretical perspective is literary and deconstructive. It is suggested that therapy, like literature, is a setting for the unfolding of narrative destiny. In a therapeutic narrative the past breaks through into the future, opening fate to chance and enhancing personal agency. The future is seen in terms of the past as `through a glass darkly'. Change is not a mere product of a therapeutic technology butfalls from life as other, in a person's own narrative time. The discussion is illustrated by examples from therapy and considers implications for the social construction of personal agency.
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