Der Overflow-Bereich für die Lecture: L-01 Siri Hustvedt befindet sich in den Sälen A1. A3, A8
Filling in the blanks: narrative and the dynamic representation of psychiatric illness
Siri Hustvedt, New York (United States)
Details anzeigen
Autor:in:
Siri Hustvedt, New York (United States)
The history of psychiatry has swung between two poles, the physiological ground of mental reality and the psychological experience of the patient. Caught in the perpetual trap of the mind/body problem, contemporary psychiatry has resorted to the static model of classification by symptom description (the DSM) and the biomedical disease model of neuroscience. Despite decades of research, neuroscience (itself long plagued by a Cartesian split) has not been able to locate the causes of psychiatric illness in brain structure or function. Narrative psychiatry is not a substitute for pragmatic classification or for physiological research, which must and are continuing under shifting models. Rather, it is part of a pluralist epistemology, which recognizes that story, ubiquitous in human cultures, offers a representation of the dynamic reality of psychiatric illness as situated in specific relational and social contexts that is missing from other theories.The meanings created by storytelling, either verbal or written, have therapeutic effects that can alter the course of illness and may be described in terms at once physiological and psychological. I will illustrate my argument with particular cases from my experiences teaching writing to psychiatric patients and my current seminars at Weill Cornell Medical College with psychiatric residents.