Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots
The Narrative Structure of Experience

A study how patients and practitioners transform ordinary clinical interchange into a story-line.

Cheryl Mattingly (Author)

9780521630047, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 October 1998

208 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 1.9 cm, 0.445 kg

'Mattingly provides the richest discussion to date of the relevance of narrative theory for many of the most crucial issues of contemporary, studies of culture. Plot, motive, desire, sufferance, reversal and transformation are all found to be features of therapeutic 'rituals of the everyday' and by extension of the achievement of 'significant experience' in the most ordinary social routines. Exquisite reflections on philosophical and literary texts, juxtaposed with captivating stories from the clinic this is a work of maturity and great importance.' Byron Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

There is a 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 from 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.

1. Finding narrative in clinical practice
2. The mimetic question
3. The checkers game: clinical actions in quest of a narrative
4. Therapeutic plots
5. The self in narrative suspense: therapeutic plots and life plots
6. Some moments are more narrative than others
7. Therapeutic plots, healing rituals, and the creation of significant experience.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]