Edna Foa asks rape victims to come in and tape-record the story of their trauma again and again and again in a process the Israeli psychologist calls “imaginal exposure” (1998). The authors of the essays in Therapeutic Uses of Storytelling: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Narration as Therapy consider why such an act could have therapeutic efficacy. Psychotherapists are in a sense stuck with stories; they cannot be present to the events that form patients’ lives. Their undertaking is to make a virtue of this necessity. It is after all what narrators think happened that counts, not whatever “really” happened. But ethnographers who collect stories also find themselves implicated in the effects of tellings. What are these effects? How do they work? Is there something inherently therapeutic about telling stories?
The essayists in Camilla Asplund Ingemark’s collection address the question, is narrative therapeutic? This shifts attention from the events the story is about to the occasion of its telling. Narratives have prospective as well as retrospective effects. They shape the past by the way they represent events and they shape the future by the way these representations affect their tellers. In 1976, Roy Schaffer introduced a new term for the psychoanalytic process: “narrative therapy.” Other therapists took up the idea, including some of the contributors to Ingemark’s collection. But her interest is not only in the uses of narrative in therapy but also the therapeutic effects of narrating in extra-therapeutic situations. The act of narration itself has effects on narrators and narratees. This collection is about those effects.
Donald Polkinghorne’s introductory essay sets out the philosophical sources of narrative theory, especially in phenomenology. It argues that the way humans use stories to make sense of themselves and their lives turns them toward the great human questions of being and meaning. It is left to the rest of the essayists to anchor these theoretical inquiries in specific bodies and stories. And this works well. What does not is Polkinghorne’s treatment of ends as goals, which misses the way storytellers make sense of what happens to them afterwards. And there are distinctions to be made between ascribing consequentiality to events and experiencing events as consequential, between, that is, telling stories about one’s life and living a life as if it were a story, at both the level of ordinary anecdotes and life stories. All this gets slippery when it arrives at the question of whether the way we live lives—or the way we tell stories, for that matter—is consciously intentional—goal-directed in Polkinghorne’s sense—or not.
Tellings require listenings. Moon Meier’s essay raises the question of how professional storytellers get the floor, how they get audiences to listen. Meier touches, fleetingly, suggestively, on a connection one of her storytellers makes between pain and listening but without either locating that dynamic in the performances she studies or saying how it might be therapeutic. Some of the essays included here have the quality of notes from a journal or fragments of a larger paper. This is one. It could use both instances and argument. What happens if listeners talk back? Geir Lundby’s touching accounts of telling clients what they told him suggest two possibilities. The first is to make sure the hearer understood what the teller meant; the therapist is under correction by the patient (instead of the other way around). But it is the second that is both troubling and promising. The reteller offers back both more and other than the teller put forth, in these instances by hooking together narrative fragments into a coherent narrative of improvement, though such a retelling might equally offer back a darker tale of the “absent but implicit” qualities implied by stories, the hidden stories Umberto Eco called “ghost chapters” (1980). The virtue of Lundby’s “double stories” is that they make stories as much the hearer’s as the teller’s; the vice—if it is one—is the covering over of the difficult in the interest of promising a happy ending.
Tellers bring forth selves in stories, not just for hearers but also for themselves. Andreas McKeough adverts to a notion Kenneth Gergen and Mary Gergen call “self-narratives” (1983) in which the teller projects a self into a story and gets a self out of one. Such tellings can make sense of traumatic experiences by what McKeough calls “reconfiguration.” Whether the self whose coherence is held together by narrative conventions can hold together the traumatized narrator who imagines that narrative self is in question. It is possible but it is hard to see how to secure it, either in writing, which McKeough examines, or in speaking.
If the story I tell is the story of my life, then my life is a story without an end because I will never be there to tell it. What, then, is the point of telling stories for the terminally ill? This is the question Piret Paal addresses. Paal takes up Cheryl Mattingly’s term “therapeutic emplotment” to describe how ill persons are inserted into an institutional narrative that deprives them of their own scripts. Instead of looking toward death as their end, Paal recounts the resistant narratives of patients who reorient tellings to another end, not death but any of the myriad moments before death that can be made to glow with meaning. A woman with a mastectomy who is dying of breast cancer tells the story of her husband coming to see her and telling her he has had to cut one of the two great branches off the birch tree in front of their house because the branch is dying so now, she recounts him as telling her, “now the tree is reminiscent of me.”
Sofie Strandén-Backa explicitly broaches the possibility that telling might be therapeutic of itself. The interviewee is relieved of secrets; the interviewer offers what Stradén-Backa regards as a detached empathy. But she points out that it is an assumption that if you cannot talk about it, you haven’t worked through it. It may not be so. Telling might not be enough; empathy might not be enough; ethnographic interviews may not be therapeutic. But it is also possible that telling is enough, even if the tale is incoherent. R. D. Laing (1960) described the way schizophrenics use language as “word salad”; Gregory Bateson (1972) considered such language metaphorical without the metacommunicative message indicating that. Karolina Kähmi proposes the possibility that harnessing these vagaries of language to poetry might offer schizophrenics safe anchorage for the metaphorical end of their metaphors without requiring them to deal with the literal referents they conceal. Then, something might move, not consciously or literally, but somewhere deeper in or lower down, somewhere beyond the merely referential.
What are stories for? Camilla Asplund Ingemark and Dominic Ingemark invoke a distinction the Epicurean philosopher Diogenes of Oenoanda makes between the fear of definite objects and the fear of indefinite objects—the sort of fear that afflicts us in the dark—to argue that ancient Greek and Roman tales of demons who kill children produce a therapeutic effect by making the indefinite definite. Scapegoating at once personifies the problem (on the model the child therapist Michael White introduced into his work), places it outside the body of the person who has it, and provides it a boundary. But sometimes fear is beyond telling. Tuija Saarinen addresses the impossibility of incorporating counter-narratives into the master narrative of a historical period. The tales of Russian prisoners in Finland and Finnish prisoners in Russia resist the master narrative of friendship between the peoples. Tales of the mistreatment of prisoners, lost prisoners, and vanished soldiers become stories without endings. Trauma presents itself as the unnarratable.
Traumatic events are now mediated, as Kyrre Kverndokk puts it, in “real, real time” (138), by social media as they happen. A single tweet subjected the terrorist attacks in Norway on July 22, 2011, to immediate inversion, conversion, and erasure: terror became love. A new master narrative took hold. As a consequence of its instant mediation, spontaneous shrines, in Jack Santino’s term, arose so quickly that rose parades were being organized even as bodies were being counted. There was no event; there was already and only what Kverndokk terms a “social media event” (138). The virtual trumped the actual. The sheer speed of the disappearance of the real into the virtual raises the question of whether there is ever any real. When stories form later, we can imagine that a real preceded them. Here, the real eludes us immediately. Has it never been there? Are there always nothing but stories? And in contrast to mediated stories of public events, what about mediated stories of private events? Risto Niemi-Pyhttäri examines “writing in public”: online blog diaries. Are they more or other than exhibitionistic on the part of the writer and voyeuristic on the part of the reader? Niemi-Pyhttäri argues that in the act of exposing herself, the “melancholy blogger” is also reconfiguring the public and the private. Something is still willfully hidden. Though not curative, making words work might move such a blogger out of depression characterized by muteness, the loss of inner speech, and inexpression, toward a more emotionally inflected melancholy.
With the exception of Polkinghorne’s, these essays are not theories but stories, stories about telling stories. Their tellers speculate on the therapeutic effects of these tellings. They are evocative or provocative for scholars in fields from psychology to folklore. Read one or two. They will incite you to think out a theory of narrative that might account for their most interesting therapeutic uses.
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[Review length: 1581 words • Review posted on March 18, 2015]