“It Is Not Wit,It Is Truth:” Transcending the Narrative Bounds of Professional and Personal Identity in Life and in Art

Taking inspiration from the film Wit (2001), adapted from Margaret Edson’s (1999) Pulitzer Prize-winning play, this article explores the particularities of witnessing a cinematic cancer narrative juxtaposed with the author’s own cancer narrative. The analysis reveals the tenuous line between death and dying, illness and wellness, life and living and the resulting identities shaped in the process of understanding both from a personal and professional lens. By framing these representations of illness experience within the narrative constructions of drama, time, metaphor and morality, the personal stories of intellectual knowledge converging with intimate and embodied knowing are revealed.     

"I've also experienced loss and fear": Effects of prior similar experience on empathy

Although it is frequently argued that empathy is increased by similar experiences, this idea has rarely been tested. This study investigated the relationship between empathy and prior similar experience. Participants read four different stories and rated the degree of empathy they felt. They also reported the extent to which they had prior similar experience of the events in the stories. We found that these self-reports of prior similar experience increased empathy for the persons in the stories. Similar experience may be an important situational antecedent for feeling empathy for another person. Pointing out similarities among experiences may be a fruitful means of training empathy.     

Death in the new age

Modern death is characterized by secularization, and the related features of medical‐ization, privatization and individualism, and is increasingly criticized from an expressivist position. This is the context in which a considerable volume of New Age writing on death and dying has emerged. The article explores New Age concepts of the soul and of reincarnation, the basis for these beliefs and the effect they have on care of the dying, the willingness of New Age carers to let the dying person be him or herself, and New Age theodicies. It is concluded that the New Age concern with the soul of the dying represents a significant attempt to reverse the secularization of death, though the success of this endeavour may be undermined by emphasis on the variety of personal experience and meaning.     

The titration of death: a new sin

..."Titration of death" is the phrase I have used, in private musings and discussions, to express the undertaking of causing or permitting death to occur within carefully delimited parameters. It is, I think, a new form of sin. I distinguish it from a similar enterprise, in principle benign, that we might call "titration of dying," which attempts to manage the dying process. The focus of attention of titration of dying is the experience of the patient prior to death, with little or no concern given to the condition of the cadaver following death. Titration of death, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with producing, at the close of the process, a cadaver that is usable in some manner; and titration of death, per se, has only incidental concern with the dying process.     

Learning from Clients: Counseling the Frail and Dying Elderly

Each counseling experience with a frail or dying client is a learning opportunity. In these circumstances if is the counselor who is the student.     

Retrospective reflexivity: The residual and subliminal repercussions of researching war

Stories of the war have been a known part of my story as granddaughter of Polish post-war migrants. Yet venturing into these stories as researcher has been troubling; I found their closeness and their raw emotion difficult to process. Significant sections of my interview schedules entailed participants recounting their own, their parents' or their grandparents' stories of war and migration, with traumatic episodes frequently intersecting into their stories. As a researcher, these traumatic narratives have had a residual quality, lasting in my subconscious long after the interviews themselves and doctorate for which they were conducted had finished.In this paper, I focus on experiences of, and reactions to listening to, analysing and writing about these traumatic cultural memories. Collins (1998: 3.35) has observed that ‘the emotions experienced, whether by the interviewer or interviewee, are as real, as important and as interesting as any other product of the interview’; my powerfully felt experiences with traumatic content have validated this sentiment. With a retrospective reflexivity I now realise that these cultural memories were not the only ‘product’ of my research, but that how they were narrated and how I dealt with them were also a significant part of the research process, and indeed stories in themselves. Here I attempt to retell how these stories impacted me as the researcher; how in the case of particularly harrowing stories, I also needed time to absorb the narratives, to comprehend the participant's experiences and their ability to narrate such stories, and to recover from the experience of listening to such accounts.     

The Sense of Being Dead and of Dying: Some Perspectives

The present communication is made in response to a published study (Lester and Schumacher, 1969) which found no support for hypotheses that schizophrenic women might usefully be conceptualized as dying women, and that schizophrenics (men and women) would have more death themes in their TAT stories than non-schizophrenics. The present authors argue that there is no reason to expect schizophrenic women to feel like dying women, do present empirical data strongly supporting the notion of a relation between feelings of unreality and of deadness, and suggest reasons for Lester and Schumacher's failure to find schizophrenic-nonschizophrenic differences in TAT themes of death.     

From Daily Life to Philosophy

Abstract: This article argues that the little everyday things of life often provide excellent entries into the intellectual problems of academic philosophy. This is illustrated with an analysis of four small stories taken from daily life in which people are in agony because they do not know what to do. It is argued that the crucial question in these stories is a philosophical question—not a closed request for empirical or formal information but an open question about how best to conceive of human experience. A discussion follows of the merits and shortcomings of transcendentalism as an attempt by philosophers to make progress. It is argued that reformulating questions is what philosophers can do to contribute to people's comfort in life. This is illustrated with an argument showing that in the small stories discussed the question of what to do should be reformulated as the question of who to be.     

儿童对他人情绪与过去经验的关系的认知

用设置故事情景的方法对儿童对他人情绪与过去经验的关系的认知进行了实验研究。研究表明,4～7岁儿童能够认知他人情绪与过去经验的关系,认知能力随年龄的增长不断提高。情绪效价和情绪情景的匹配性影响儿童对他人情绪与过去经验关系的认知。4、5岁儿童更能认识到正性情绪情景条件下体验到负性情绪的他人情绪与过去经验的关系,其得分显著高于其它情绪情景故事和行为故事。     

Assisted death and martyrdom.

Against the backdrop of ancient, mediaeval and modern Catholic teaching prohibiting killing (the rule against killing), the question of assisted suicide and euthanasia is examined. In the past the Church has modified its initial repugnance for killing by developing specific guidelines for permitting killing under strict conditions. This took place with respect to capital punishment and a just war, for example. One wonders why in the least objectionable instance, when a person is already dying, suffering, and repeatedly requesting assistance in dying, there is still such widespread condemnation of assisted suicide and euthanasia. In a Gedankexperiment, I suggest that certain stories of martyrdom in the history of the Christian Church shed some light on the role of taking one's life, or putting one's life in danger out of love. I further suggest that requesting assisted suicide and/or euthanasia from the motive of love of one's family or care givers might possibly qualify as one instance of justifiable euthanasia, although I acknowledge that the Church will not be making changes in its stance any time soon.     

Shared Near-Death and Related Illness Experiences: Steps on an Unscheduled Journey

This paper discusses the key social features in shared journeys into near-death experiences (NDEs) and related illness experiences of other people. Of special interest in this paper is the way that those persons who are not ill or near death account for their sharing of these experiences. These are often people who are caregivers or intimates of NDErs or dying people but who claim to share part of the NDE or dying experience. We provide case examples to illustrate the essential psychological and social experiences that these people undergo during their joint experiences with NDErs and other seriously ill people. From an analysis of the recurrent themes emergent in these joint experiences we identify and discuss the major conceptual steps in the creation of their personal explanations: (1) Exit the Familiar, (2) Extraordinary Experiences, (3) Extraordinary Experiences End, (4) What Happened to Me? (5) The World Responds, and (6) The Return of the Native. In the final analysis, the processes that these people undergo in the search for explanations is similar in most respects to those at the center of near-death and other related illness experiences.     

Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles

Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.     

Tales of the Absent Father: Applying the “Story” Metaphor in Family Therapy

Father-absent families often function with a lively father-presence conveyed by stories the family members share. The metaphor of “story” proposed by social constructionist and narrative approaches to therapy helps us to conceptualize the role these family stories play. The story metaphor draws attention to four issues: the rendition of what is said and unsaid about the father; the connections among past, present, and future ideas about father and family; the reciprocal influences of expression and experience, seen in the family's stories and interactions; and the impact on the family and the therapeutic process of dominant narratives about father-absence. Exploration of these issues demonstrates how client and therapist stories about the absent father mediate the impact of father-absence on the family.     

LOSS STORY

Loss has many layers and complexities.The experience itself is known socially while it registers emotionally, in the body. Both the social and the embodied experience comprise the subject matter that we seek to understand, perhaps even "know," as it plays its part in our lives. This knowledge arises in personal reflection and in the stories that are told after the event. In this respect stories are an integral part of the loss experience. The present article was written 5 years after the death of my father (and was itself triggered by another loss experience). Like the loss experience, stories of loss can be enriching, perhaps even transformative, when they communicate intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally.     

Girls’ Stories About Their First Sexual Intercourse: Readiness,Affection and Experience-Seeking in the Process of Growing into Womanhood

This study introduces Finnish girls’ views on and explanations for the factors contributing to their decisions concerning their first sexual intercourse. The data consists of personal interviews with girls aged 16–19, and stories produced through process drama. The analysis was conducted by narrative methods. Two model story categories of the first sexual intercourse stories were constructed: the close relationship and the casual relationship. The close relationship category consists of elements of two sub-stories: the conventional and the planned love story. The casual relationship category consists of elements of the tragic love, the teenage party and the experience-seeking sub-stories. Being prepared for sex was a shared plot element in all of the first intercourse stories. In the close relationship category the other major explanatory factors were mutual love and a steady relationship. In the casual relationship category the explanatory factors were girl’s affection for the partner without a relationship or getting experience, respectively. The girls’ agency in the use of contraception and the intercourse itself differed between the sub-stories. Girls regarded intercourse as an important step towards their womanhood. Those who work with teenagers should be aware of these stories in order to reinforce those stories where teenagers are active agents.     

Narratives at work: the development of career identity

Well-developed career stories are becoming increasingly important for individuals as they navigate an unstable and unpredictable labour market. Existing narrative approaches in career guidance do not yet clearly identify the learning process by which career stories are created. In this article, a model of transformation-through-writing will be introduced to help explain the learning process that occurs when narratives are used for constructing career stories. We propose that this learning process occurs stepwise in four cognitive stages: sensing, sifting, focusing, and understanding. To progress through these stages, an internal (with oneself) as well as an external (with relevant others) dialogue is needed. The case study used to illustrate the process is a story of unemployment and effectively shows how narratives can be created through expressive and reflective writing and how such a process may foster career learning in response to a boundary experience.     

The Clergy,the Clinician,and the Narrative of Violent Death

When death of a loved one occurs, humans use stories as a way of processing their grief and releasing their emotional attachment. In the case of traumatic and violent death, the story telling process is distorted, and focuses intensely and sometimes obsessively, on a often fantasized reenactment of the dying. Violent dying grief is often complicated further by the public and legal processes that surround violent death. The bereaved who get stuck in this dynamic may constitute a new psychiatric diagnosis called “prolonged grief disorder” and the author describes the criteria for this disorder. Clergy can play a key role in stabilizing and meditating the effects of trauma by inviting the bereaved to refocus their story telling, to a story of the loved one’s life. In a case the author illustrates many of the techniques used in this process of working with a prolonged grief disorder.     

Poetic Possibilities in Conversations About Suffering

Suffering is presented as an experience affected by the meanings, stories, and conversations held by sufferers and caregivers. Seen this way, therapy offers many opportunities to join sufferers and caregivers in a search for meanings, stories, and ways of talking that best serve them. By bringing a poetic sensitivity to how therapists listen and intervene it is possible to engage these clients in reflecting upon, trying on, and engaging in new, relief-promoting forms of meaning. Further, this way of intervening can heuristically prompt sufferers and caregivers to engage in poetic meaning-making when they feel stuck on the sameness of meanings they associate with suffering.     

"Broken covenant": healthcare aides' "experience of the ethical" in caring for dying seniors in a personal care home

Canada's population is aging, and seniors constitute the fastest growing demographic in the nation. The chronic health conditions, limited social support, functional decline, and cognitive impairment experienced by seniors may necessitate admission to a personal care home (PCH) setting up until the time of their death. The ethical problems that arise in the care of dying patients are numerous and complicated. The care of dying seniors in PCHs, however, is largely provided by frontline workers such as healthcare aides (HCAs), who usually have little training in palliative care or ethics. Research examining the identification and resolution of ethical problems in care of the dying has been conducted from the perspectives of nurses and physicians in various clinical settings, but the voice of HCAs in PCHs is virtually absent from clinical ethics. Given that the inability to satisfactorily resolve ethical issues in clinical practice is associated with feelings of guilt, powerlessness, avoiding contact with patients, failing to provide good physical care, and increased staff turnover, an empirical examination of HCAs' experiences of ethically challenging situations is warranted. We conducted a phenomenological study to access the lived experience of HCAs (N = 12) working in proprietary and nonproprietary care homes as they encountered situations they deemed ethically challenging in providing end-of-life care to dying seniors. The findings reported here explicate: (1) the types of situations that are ethically problematic for HCAs; (2) the meanings they assign to these situations, and (3) the impact such situations have on the provision of end-of-life care.     

Sex differences and androgyny in fantasy content

Fantasy stories were composed by 153 undergraduates (93 females, 60 males) who also responded to the Bem Sex Role Inventory. The fantasy stories were collected by group administration of a Thematic Apperception Test. The stories were content analyzed along 17 imagery categories. Males and females differed significantly in ten of these categories. The results indicate a substantial continuity of sex differences in fantasy content between earlier decades and the mid 1970s. However, women had relatively more imagery of a self-assertive, pleasurable, and careerist nature than had been found in earlier studies. The fantasies of sex-typed persons were more situation-bound and more sexual than those of androgynous persons. Sex-typed persons appear to experience limitations in fantasy production which parallel their limitations in overt behavior.