How People Change: The Short Story as Case History

How People Change: The Short Story as Case History

by William Tucker
How People Change: The Short Story as Case History

How People Change: The Short Story as Case History

by William Tucker

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Overview

A manual to show practicing physicians and medical students how to make use of short stories to help their patients adapt to their illnesses and participate in their treatment.

For most people, the quickest route to wisdom, other than experience, is through stories. Stories speak across generational lines and cultures, emphasize the universality of human experience, and offer insight into the dynamics involved in unfamiliar situations.

Freud and D.W. Winnicott were among the few psychiatrists able to write case histories emblematic of the vicissitudes of the human condition. As a rule, the technical and dry approach of the psychiatric literature is not fit to teach doctors how to connect to their patients' suffering because it privileges pathological categories over experience. Tucker, therefore, turns to the drama and conflicts of fictional characters, to restore the human dimension of medicine and to entice practitioners to grasp the emotional and intellectual layers of the particular situations in which their patients are entrapped. The sixteen stories selected here are analyzed to show how they illustrate the process of change, as defined by Erik Erikson’s description of the "life cycle." Some of these stories include "Gooseberries" by Anton Chekhov, "The Dead" by James Joyce, and "Her First Ball" by Katherine Mansfield. Physicians and medical students can turn to these narratives as examples of how others have dealt with challenges and debilitating conditions, and encourage their patients to follow similar paths to bring about change in their lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781590512128
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Publication date: 06/17/2007
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

William Tucker, M.D.

William Tucker, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has been teaching psychiatry and the humanistic aspects of medicine to psychiatric residents, medical students learning internal medicine, and interested colleagues, for the past 30 years.

Table of Contents


Foreword     ix
Acknowledgments     xi
Introduction     1
A Method for Discussing Short Stories as Case Histories     17
The Short Stories     27
Grisha   Anton Chekhov     29
The Rocking-Horse Winner   D. H. Lawrence     33
Oysters   Anton Chekhov     48
Good-bye Marcus, Good-bye Rose   Jean Rhys     52
Araby   James Joyce     57
The Man Who Was Almost a Man   Richard Wright     63
Her First Ball   Katherine Mansfield     75
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities   Delmore Schwartz     82
My First Marriage   Ruth Prawer Jhabvala     90
Good Country People   Flannery O'Connor     105
The Dead   James Joyce     124
The Adulterous Woman   Albert Camus     162
He   Katherine Anne Porter     177
The Overcoat   Nicolai Gogol     187
Gooseberries   Anton Chekhov     219
Sleep It Off, Lady   Jean Rhys     229
Discussion of the Short Stories     241
ApplyingShort Stories to Clinical Work     315
Some Other Stories Illustrating Change     321
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