MC: Maura Spiegel: Gaining Access to Experience: Strategies for Close Reading and Close Listening in Narrative Medicine

Narrative Medicine emerged to challenge a fragmented, inequitable and increasingly alienating healthcare system in the United States and elsewhere.  Narrative skills, we have discovered, increase the scope of clinicians’ knowledge of their patients, and of the institutional and structural dimensions of their own and their patients’ circumstances.  In healthcare and healthcare education, the introduction of narrative practices –the close reading of literary, visual and cinematic texts, along with writing together in small groups-- has been shown to enhance team cohesion and trust, to address physician burn-out, to increase awareness of race-based healthcare disparities, and to bring healthcare providers into a more meaningful relationship to their work.  

The intellectual foundations of Narrative Medicine include literary and aesthetic theory, narratology, and relational psychoanalysis, among other fields. Hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur, oral historian Alessandro Portelli and psychoanalyst Donnel Stern will help us explore three concepts within Narrative Medicine: the construction of meaning through narrative; the co-constructed relational encounter, and the importance of gaining access to experience. Along with discussion of the assigned articles, we will undertake some narrative medicine exercises. These will give us access to the relational substrate of reading –and to the creative processes that increasingly have helped caregivers build the conceptual and practical skills to elicit, respond to and affiliate with patients and co-workers.

// Prof. Dr. Maura Spiegel (Columbia University)