Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Finding narrative in clinical practice
- 2 The mimetic question
- 3 The checkers game: clinical actions in quest of a narrative
- 4 Therapeutic plots
- 5 The self in narrative suspense: therapeutic plots and life stories
- 6 Some moments are more narrative than others
- 7 Therapeutic plots, healing rituals, and the creation of significant experience
- Notes
- References
- Index
4 - Therapeutic plots
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Finding narrative in clinical practice
- 2 The mimetic question
- 3 The checkers game: clinical actions in quest of a narrative
- 4 Therapeutic plots
- 5 The self in narrative suspense: therapeutic plots and life stories
- 6 Some moments are more narrative than others
- 7 Therapeutic plots, healing rituals, and the creation of significant experience
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
In each new clinical situation., the occupational therapist must answer the question: What story am I in? To give an answer is to make some initial sense of the situation on which the therapist can act. Discovering an intelligible story is often helped through analogy. Therapists may say to themselves, How is this situation like others I have been in? Or, put narratively, How could I retell, in a new way, an old story? As a way of framing a practical decision about what to do, stories offer an account about what has happened which gives a view of which actions make sense as appropriate next steps. Stories place events within a temporal context and in order to know how to act therapists often need a historical sense which locates them in relation to some past and some anticipated future.
This need for narrative framing as a guide to practice is suggested by a nurse quoted in Benner's study of clinical reasoning in nursing. This nurse, who works in an intensive care nursery, describes what she considers the most essential kind of thinking she wants her newly graduated students to evince at the end of their three-month affiliation with her.
To my mind, moving the child from Point A to Point B is what nursing is all about. You have to perform tasks along the way to make that happen, but performing the task isn't nursing. […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Healing Dramas and Clinical PlotsThe Narrative Structure of Experience, pp. 72 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998