Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience

by Cheryl Mattingly

Overview

There 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521639941
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/08/1998
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology , #7
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	715,656
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)

Table of Contents

1. Finding narrative in clinical practice; 2. The mimetic question; 3. The checkers game: clinical actions in quest of a narrative; 4. Therapeutic plots; 5. The self in narrative suspense: therapeutic plots and life plots; 6. Some moments are more narrative than others; 7. Therapeutic plots, healing rituals, and the creation of significant experience.

Editorial Reviews

"Cheryl Mattingly has produced a little masterpiece. Her book brings anthropological theory to bear in a most subtle and knowledgeable way on how occupational therapists help patients who are so severely disabled that they are no longer able to live their lives with the ordinariness and banality to which we all become accustomed. Her focus is principally upon how therapists and patients together create a new and workable life narrative that restores meaning and order to a shattered life. She manages this task with a combination of anthropological astuteness and human compassion that is gripping. And along the way she succeeds in shedding fresh light on such ancient riddles as how life imitates (narrative) art while such art remains in some respects an imitation of life. This is a book not just for the medical anthropologist or the occupational therapist but for human scientists at large!" Jerome Bruner

"Mattingly provides the richest discussion to date of the relevance of narrative theory for many of the most crucial issues of contemporary studies of culture. Plot, motive, desire, sufferance, reversal and transformation are all found to be features of therapeutic 'rituals of the everyday' - and by extension of the achievement of 'significant experience' in the most ordinary social routines. Exquisite reflections on philosophical and literary texts, juxtaposed with captivating stories from the clinic, this is a work of maturity and great importance." Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

"Mattingly has clearly moved the conversation about narrative in clinical settings forward. Her accounts and analysis are often so subtle and sensitive that the text moves us in ways that go beyond ‘purely' academic writing to experiences that enrich our lives as well as our understandings. Surely this is the most important work we can do in this field." Barbara A. Sherman Heifferon, Literature and Medicine

"...this is an impressive book in terms of the critique of existing theory and the deep analysis narrative can provide....This book encourages reflection into personal practice as well as to listening to the narratives of patients....an excellent text to use as part of anadvanced clinical reasoning course." Occupational Theory in Health Care

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