Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience

by Cheryl Mattingly

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 theory of social action and experience. While most contemporary theories of narrative presume that narratives impose an artificial coherence upon lived experience, Mattingly argues for a revision of the classic mimetic position. If narrative offers a correspondence to lived experience, she contends, the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not narrative coherence but narrative drama. Moving and sophisticated, this book is an innovative contribution to the study of modern institutions and to anthropological theory.

Genres: Anthropology

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Megan Holodniuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for a university research paper but I wouldn't mind a re-read based on the nature of my work now.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is simultaneously a dense and highly accessible book that deepens notions of illness narratives within health care. I especially appreciated Mattingly's weaving in of 'real life' stories of therapeutic interactions between occupational therapists and rehabilitation patients who are negotiating their way to some sort of healing. What I found somewhat irritating and forced in places was Mattingly's insistence on drawing parallels between these healthcare setting clinical narrative dramas/rituals and those of 'primitive' exotic (to us) communities in remote areas of the world. I realize that Mattingly is a medical anthropologist and probably feels compelled to honor her scholarly lineage, but I felt it detracted from the strength of her arguments.

[Matthewaqq · Rating 4 out of 5]

When a story is told, if that storytelling is successful, it creates in the listener a hope that some endings (generally the endings the hero also cares about) will transpire... 
The parallel between the told story and the lived time is easily drawn if life in time is characterized, following Heidegger (1962), as a present located between past and future. Our orientation in time, as Heidegger tells us, is an orientation toward a future... Desire in the face of an uncertain future plays a central structuring role.

[Gemma]

I'm using this for my anthro project