Tożsamość narracyjna osób z chorobą nowotworową

Abstract

Research about health loss shows that the way we experience critical moments and build a new identity are important in giving meaning to disease. It allow to integrate the experience of illness into the whole of life. The aim of the research was to analyze the narrative identity reflected in the life history and to explore the factors contributing to the differences in the formed narratives. A research question was: what narrative about one’s life does a person with an oncological disease create? The Polish adaptation of Dan McAdams’ life story interview was used. The study was conducted in group of four people with cancer remission. The research material was subjected to McAdams’ proposed sequence and consistency analysis. Elements of hermeneutic analysis were also used. The patients identity is coherent and mature, their narrative include the time from childhood to the present. Narratives differ in the degree of paying attention on the description of emotional experiences, the level of detail and the way of moving to the next stages of the story. Patient include the disease in their narratives, doing so in an individual way. However, it is possible to distinguish two ways of storytelling. One of them is the location of the disease in the broader background of the life situation, the other – recognizing the disease as the main moment in a given part of the story, constituting its title. It seems interesting to perform comparative research in a group of people, who are during diagnosis of cancer and relate them to the results of people in remission stage.