Abstract
The idea that the act of narrating one’s experience, in particular reorganizing disruptive experiences into a coherent story, is conducive to well-being has become popular in the social sciences and in therapeutic practice. Ways of remembering and narrating draw on templates of the larger societal, historical, and cultural context and thus situate the memory of one’s particular experience within a collectively shared world. However, other voices argue that the driving force of storytelling is less the need for coherence or continuity, but rather the reconstruction of a sense of agency in intersubjective relationships. This paper will explore the question of what is at stake, what is existentially imperative, in the human practice of narrating experience. Using a phenomenological framework that pays attention to the intersubjective space of perception and experience, I will apply narrative approaches drawing on medical anthropolog y, linguistics, and psychology to my conversations with Mary, a long-time caregiver for chronically ill family members.
Highlights
The idea that the act of narrating one’s experience, in particular reorganizing disruptive experiences into a coherent story, is conducive to well-being has become popular in the social sciences and in therapeutic practice
Tionship between experience and perception, in Narrative, in this perspective, is seen as an order to establish the notion of inter-experience articulation of a person’s sense of self; a coher- (Jackson 2002) as a fundamental assumption for ent narrative reflects a sense of coherence which my argument
Bakhtin’s master research in health psychology demonstrates the trope of heteroglossia which I will succinctly depositive physiological outcomes of cognitive scribe to support the argument of this paper
Summary
M: I think it helps to find words, it helps to tell our story, it helps us to find metaphors, it helps us to make sense, it helps us to make sense ... and if you have the words that seem to open other doors, you start thinking about it in a different way, this whole concept of reframing. It allowed Mary to feel morally at ease, to accept her emotional state, and to feel legitimized in her decision to give her husband into a care institution It becomes clear how Mary’s particular experience is articulated using various socially and culturally based narratives that strive for a shared ontological horizon and allow her to re-situate herself as a morally sound member of her social environment. Multiple voices such as socially grounded family and gender narratives, medical discourses, moral questions, and professional knowledge are combined in fragments of her continuing and partial stories that work to restore her sense of having a say in past, present, and future inter-experience. Professional discourses of transforming experience into socially acceptable articulations did not strengthen her sense of agency but provoked her resistance, as she perceived them as attacks on her power to make decisions: M: I think there is some pressure to be upbeat, to be .. in control .. you know .. and, and .. you’re not always
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