The Place of Narrative in Psychiatric Theory and Practice

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper, we examine the implications for psychiatry of the view that "we are narrative beings, fashioning our selves from the stuff of stories, locating our biographies and life projects in discursive webs of shared meaning." We begin with the claim that narrative capacities, skills, practices, and specific content can contribute to the causes, course, and outcomes of psychopathology as well as to processes of coping, resilience, healing, and recovery. One consequence of this claim is that understanding the human capacity to produce, think, and interact with others through narrative must play a central role in psychiatric theory, research and practice. To approach the interactions between cultural discursive formations, narrative practices, and neurobiological mechanisms in psychiatry, we propose an integrative cultural-ecosocial framework mobilizing the paradigms of enactment and embodiment in cognitive science, narrative theories of selfhood and personality, ecological systems theory in social science, and active inference approaches in computational neuroscience.