Narratives and Healing: Implications for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy

While narrative has become increasingly important in the humanities, social sciences and medicine and psychotherapy, it is medical anthropology that has predominantly focused on the role of narrative in healing and how individual narratives reflect overarching cultural themes.

Collecting narratives is part of the everyday work of medical Anthropologists. As part of fieldwork they typically spend at least a year living in another community asking people about their families, their religion, their understanding of the Cosmos, politics, social roles and various other aspects of their lives. The ethnographic accounts are then published using narrative as an analytic tool to support arguments.

Launer points out how sociology and ethnography see psychiatry among the medical specialities as peculiarly culture bound and occupying the uncomfortable no man’s land between conventional medical science and the search for meaning.