Soothe-sayers and storytellers

2024

10:30am, July 4, 2024, Western Sydney University Unlocking My Brain: Through the Labyrinth of Acquired Brain Injury (2014), by Dr. Christine Durham and My Lucky Stroke (2020), written by Dr. Sarah Brooker, both recount personal tragedies and how the lives of these women changed overnight following a traumatic brain injury caused by a brutal car-driving accident. Their nonfiction writings, which go under the restrictive label of “acquired brain injury memoirs”, reveal how their subjects are coping with acquired disability and how their personalities and subjective well-being are getting affected by it. Therefore, I will build upon cognitive literary theory, and more specifically upon Neuro Lit Crit, to analyse the acquired brain injury (henceforth abbreviated as ABI) memoir genre and its reparative possibilities which enable these writers’s plastic brains to transition from chaos to order, from trauma to resilience, and from harm to harmony. The thorough investigation of this emerging life writing genre of a special kind will show how writing can offer healing possibilities to the vulnerable body and how it can boost the much-hope-for recovery by remaining in control of one’s life narrative.

Social science & medicine, 1994

2012

Excerpt from the Introduction to the collection: "Angela Woods critically examines Arthur Frank’s account of illness narratives as emblematic of the enthusiastic adoption of narrative as core to illness experience by some of those working in medical humanities. She suggests that this positive embrace of narrative as pivotal to the project of (re)humanizing medicine should be tempered by a more critical view of narrativity. Using Galen Strawson’s article, “Against Narrativity”, she argues that it is not at all obvious that we are “‘narrative selves”’ and that the best or most healthy way to respond to illness is through narrative. However, Woods also discusses the limitations of Strawson’s approach that can be revealed by taking a phenomenological approach. She concludes by suggesting that alternative approaches to narrative medicine, such as phenomenology, may be useful for understanding the experience of illness. Woods finally proposes that a closer look not at narrative but at its opposite, silence, may also provide an alternative to the emphasis on narrative in medical humanities."

Canadian Journal of Disability Studies

This presentation offers neurodivergence embodied, autoethnography, and performance poetry. The confluence of acquiring severe traumatic brain injury combined with exposure to concepts and paradigms while pursuing a graduate degree in Disability Studies, catalyzed emergence and triggered development of my disabled identity. The brain damage acquired causes issues of decoding/deciphering/processing, which in turn triggers and/or produces episodes of temporal dissonance. When these shifts in timing occur, they have tremendous impact on rational thought processes and emotional stability. The salient aspects of my new life – emotional sensitivity and volatility – may on the surface seem detrimental and undesirable; however, I celebrate these qualities as they greatly enhance my identification with and empathy for others, which in turn drive my artistic, social, cultural, political expression, quest for community and belonging. While temporal dissonance is unlikely to occur during this p...

Abstract. Writing up research that used photo-elicitation and narrative analysis methods with adult acquired brain injury survivors in the United States shows the influence of emotions on the processes both of healing from brain injury and of learning by the social science researcher. By: Laura S. Lorenz Presented at the Fourth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI). Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois, May 14-17.

Transcultural Psychiatry, 2023

This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry.

Human Arenas

The article highlights the way storytelling and poetry can heal a worried mind and make sense of life events. Three main focuses will be presented and discussed. First is the nature and quality of storytelling and how it relates to meaning making and life events. Second is the healing power and freedom of the words used in poetry. Third is storytelling and poetry as imagination and everyday experiences. The relationship between meaning making and storytelling is something neither determined by innate biological drives nor solely created in the individual mind. To speak of meaning making in first-person narratives, one must include the concepts of culture, politics, history, and living in the world with others. By weaving concepts from the field of art, philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, and anthropology, the manuscript shows how storytelling and poetry deal with experiences and emotions that affect our understanding of life events. First-person narratives guide us back to p...

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Journal of Applied Communication Research, 2009

If sickness calls forth stories, then healing calls forth a benevolent willingness to be subject to them, subjects of them, and subjected to their transformative power. (Charon, 2006, p. 216) The field of communication boasts a rich history of narrative theory and practice

Every patient has a story to tell, and every experienced physician has a bank of stories to recall. A patient's visit is not chance but a search for a cure, amelioration of state, advice, guidance, a prescription, or for seeking reassurance, comfort, and in some circumstances, permission to "be well". From the simplest tale to the most complex, narratives abound. Sometimes, the most intimate information shared with the physician confidante, go dark and deep, with a yearning to "tell all" after a period of suppression. Successful communication and rapport also depends on the carer's response, the degree of concentration, listening skills, body language, eye contact engagement, the patient relationship and empathy.