"Mattingly has clearly moved the conversation about narrative in clinical settings forward. Her accounts
and analyses are often so subtle and sensitive that the text moves us in ways that go beyond �purely' academic
writing to experiences that enrich our lives as well as our understandings. Surely this is the most important work
we can do in this field."
- Literature and Medicine
Submitted by Publisher, March, 2001
Summary
There is growing interest in 'therapeutic narratives' and the relation between narrative and healing. Cheryl
Mattingly's ethnography of the practice of occupational therapy in a North American hospital investigates the complex
interconnections between narrative and experience in clinical work. Viewing the world of disability as a socially
constructed experience, it presents fascinatingly detailed case studies of clinical interactions between occupational
therapists and patients, many of them severely injured and disabled, and illustrates the diverse ways in which
an ordinary clinical interchange is transformed into a dramatic experience governed by a narrative plot. Drawing
on a wide range of sources, including anthropological studies of narrative and ritual, literary theory, phenomenology
and hermeneutics, this book develops a narrative theory of social action and experience. While most contemporary
theories of narrative presume that narratives impose an artificial coherence upon lived experience, Mattingly argues
for a revision of the classic mimetic position. If narrative offers a correspondence to lived experience, she contends,
the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not narrative coherence but narrative drama. Moving and sophisticated,
this book is an innovative contribution to the study of modern institutions and to anthropological theory.