STORIES, POWER, and DISTRESS

Brendan Stone

www.storyingsheffield.com @storyingshef

• Course• Research

• Public engagement• Method

To know "who" a person is it will be

necessary to have some appreciation

of the story in which the person

understands him- or herself to be a

protagonist.

Juan Galis-Menendez, ‘Paul Ricoeur on Narrative and

Personal Identity’

“...we dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative…"

Barbara Hardy, ‘Towards a Poetics of Fiction...’

“The autobiographical act recapitulates the fundamental rhythms of identity formation […] I am arguing that narrative is the sine qua non of identity formation.”

Paul John Eakin

“it is through narrativity that we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world, and it is through narratives and narrativitythat we constitute our social identities”.

Margaret R. Somers

“A basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative.”

Charles Taylor

“A person creates his identity by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative to develop fully as a person.”

Marya Schechtman.

Stories of

LackDeficitDysfunctionOne-dimension

Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“…one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?…”

• The storied life• A storied culture (power)• The colonising power of stories• The possibility and difficulty of reconfiguration (resources?)• Therapy and other stories of ‘dysfunction’• The social /intersubjective nature of stories & identity• Individualisation and absence of context in medical model• The potentially alienating effects of “narrative”• An interest in the fragmentary, the “enigmatic”• The “everyday” as a resource

• From liabilities to assets• From extraordinary to ordinary• Interrogating ‘expertise’ – who is the expert?

• Everyday life• Knowledge• Small things• Connections• Collaboration• Ways of telling