Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots The Narrative Structure of Experience [Hardcover]

A study how patients and practitioners transform ordinary clinical interchange into a story-line.There is growing interest in 'therapeutic narratives', stories that help to explain why people need to create stories, and what in the particular structure of clinical practice gives therapists and patients practical reasons for constructing stories with a specific narrative form. This ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital reveals how participants transform ordinary clinical interchange into a standardized story-line. It is an innovative contribution to anthropological theory.There is growing interest in 'therapeutic narratives', stories that help to explain why people need to create stories, and what in the particular structure of clinical practice gives therapists and patients practical reasons for constructing stories with a specific narrative form. This ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital reveals how participants transform ordinary clinical interchange into a standardized story-line. It is an innovative contribution to anthropological theory.There is growing interest in therapeutic narratives and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between occupational therapists and patients, many of them severely injured and disabled, and illustrates the diverse ways in which an ordinary clinical interchange is transformed into a dramatic experience governed by a narrative plot. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including anthropological studies of narrative and ritual, literary theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, this book develops a narrative thel£*