Healing Power of Personal Narrative

Abstract

This study is an attempt to delineate the healing power of personalnarrative, and to identify autobiography as a genre based on the personalnarrative, recovered memories of psychological traumas and confessional mode,can transform into therapeutic tools of purgation in art resulting in catharsis. Inpsychological literature, autobiography is proved that human beings naturallyseek to understand how and why significant or life turning events happen intheir own lives or in the world they exist in. The autobiographical impulse hasundertaken to record the autobiographers' life stories as a form of self-therapy.To construct a story of their lives and to compose memory, emotion and internalexperience as well as autobiographical facts into a story helps them to becomewho they are. Storytelling is an important part of self-development, and thenarration that has gone awry can be addressed in psychotherapy. Thepsychotherapists used to discuss how creative writing can help authorsarticulate, accept and understand their vulnerability and suffering by releasingtheir thoughts in the secure medium of art. Discussing the implication ofcoherence for psychotherapy they maintain that constructing a personal storyfacilitates the comprehension of significant experiences because the process ofwriting allows the remembering of events during their organization in acoherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings related to those events.The study sets out to get the record right by redefining autobiography as healingfiction –assigning to its writers a vital role in psychological rehabilitation
 through the medium of art. Then it presents the theoretical questions and termsconcerning autobiography as a genre. The aim is to locate this study within itsliterary, psychological, socio-cultural, contexts to validate the central concept of- the healing power of autobiography and its implication to the individual andcommunity alike.