Making Room for the Mythic: Creating Space for Personal Becoming Through Expanded Illness and Disability Narrative Frameworks
Elizabeth J.Berger, Master of Science, Narrative Medicine, Guest Faculty, Hofstra Northwell School of Medicine
In her book chapter entitled "Enchantment," literary theorist Rita Felski observes, “The desire to purge aesthetic experience of its enigmatic and irrational qualities merely has the effect of driving them underground” (Felski, p.54, 2008). This is especially prevalent in the evidence-bound realm of Western medical culture, often with a stifling effect on illness and disability narratives.
In a “chance” (or possibly enchanted) encounter in the student union at Columbia University in the spring of 2014, a post-baccalaureate student who had survived a severe traumatic brain injury related to her new acquaintance (the author) how she recalled the entire month she had spent in a coma. Upon learning that her listener was a chaplain and a graduate student in the University’s Narrative Medicine program, she agreed to be formally interviewed in order to capture the narrative of her wondrous experiences and to help educate others. This paper is an analysis of that 70-minute interview.
In "Life as Narrative," Jerome Bruner proposed that “world making” is the principal function of the mind (Bruner, p. 691, 2004). The content of the interview is representative of multiple “world making” frameworks. This two-tiered analysis first focuses on “world making” as it maps directly to the operational concepts of testimony and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Because “world making” in health-care narratives is sometimes prone to conflicts over what is “real,” the interview is also examined through the more nuanced lenses of mythic pathography and narrative humility.
While these frameworks are by no means definitive in their ability to capture the complexity of an individual life, they are useful in assessing and recognizing the importance of world-making truths beyond the medical model and may gesture towards a kind of knowing that transcends Western medicine’s culturally accepted epistemological grasp.
In her book chapter entitled "Enchantment," literary theorist Rita Felski observes, “The desire to purge aesthetic experience of its enigmatic and irrational qualities merely has the effect of driving them underground” (Felski, p.54, 2008). This is especially prevalent in the evidence-bound realm of Western medical culture, often with a stifling effect on illness and disability narratives.
In a “chance” (or possibly enchanted) encounter in the student union at Columbia University in the spring of 2014, a post-baccalaureate student who had survived a severe traumatic brain injury related to her new acquaintance (the author) how she recalled the entire month she had spent in a coma. Upon learning that her listener was a chaplain and a graduate student in the University’s Narrative Medicine program, she agreed to be formally interviewed in order to capture the narrative of her wondrous experiences and to help educate others. This paper is an analysis of that 70-minute interview.
In "Life as Narrative," Jerome Bruner proposed that “world making” is the principal function of the mind (Bruner, p. 691, 2004). The content of the interview is representative of multiple “world making” frameworks. This two-tiered analysis first focuses on “world making” as it maps directly to the operational concepts of testimony and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Because “world making” in health-care narratives is sometimes prone to conflicts over what is “real,” the interview is also examined through the more nuanced lenses of mythic pathography and narrative humility.
While these frameworks are by no means definitive in their ability to capture the complexity of an individual life, they are useful in assessing and recognizing the importance of world-making truths beyond the medical model and may gesture towards a kind of knowing that transcends Western medicine’s culturally accepted epistemological grasp.