Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of ExperienceThere is growing interest in "therapeutic narratives" and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between occupational therapists and patients, many of them severely injured and disabled, and illustrates the diverse ways in which an ordinary clinical interchange is transformed into a dramatic experience governed by a narrative plot. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including anthropological studies of narrative and ritual, literary theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, this book develops a narrative theory of social action and experience. While most contemporary theories of narrative presume that narratives impose an artificial coherence upon lived experience, Mattingly argues for a revision of the classic mimetic position. If narrative offers a correspondence to lived experience, she contends, the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not narrative coherence but narrative drama. Moving and sophisticated, this book is an innovative contribution to the study of modern institutions and to anthropological theory. |
Contents
Finding narrative in clinical practice | 1 |
The mimetic question | 25 |
The checkers game clinical actions in quest of a narrative | 48 |
Therapeutic plots | 72 |
The self in narrative suspense therapeutic plots and life stories | 104 |
Some moments are more narrative than others | 129 |
Common terms and phrases
action and experience activities actors aesthetic anthropologists argues Aristotle asks become beginning Bernadine body Bruner checkers game clinical coherence concerns context create cultural desire disability discourse Donna drama Elizabeth Elizabeth hopes emplotment ethnographic everyday future give goals going grins hand happened hermeneutic hospital human illness experience Ilongot interactions interpretation Jerome Bruner John kind laughs literary theory lived experience look Mary Sue Mary Sue's Mattingly meaning medical anthropology metaphor moral motives mouthstick move mythemes myths narrative structure narratology narrator notion nurse occupational therapists offer particular Patrick perspective phenomenological physical therapist play possible postmodern practice problem professional relation response Ricoeur ritual role sense session social speak spinal cord storytelling structuralist talk task tell therapeutic plot therapists and patients therapy things told transformation treatment unfolding University Press wheelchair Yeah