Listening to the patient: A perspective from narrative medicine.

Abstract

In this article, an attempt is made to synthesize some insights drawn from the fields of narrative medicine and psychoanalysis regarding the caregiver–patient relationship. All experiences of care are viewed as having their root in the original parent–infant relationships, which take places in a complex matrix of empathic attunement and minutely engaged attention to the body and communications of the other. It is suggested that the Buddhist practice of upaya is a useful analogy for the kind of open attunement that is to be aspired to in relations of care, and how such an analogous framework may be helpful to clinicians in attending, thinking and feeling toward their patients.