Story Telling and Healingby Heinz Insu Fenkl
Back in the 1980's, when I was still in graduate school studying Cultural Anthropology, I was already a validated "writer" with a Masters in Creative Writing. I had finished an autobiographical book
that was to become Memories of My Ghost Brother, both memoir and fiction. I was also studying Korean narrative folklore, Shamanism, and translation from a Semiotics and Structuralist perspective. Those were the good old days before Deconstruction, Critical Theory, and Postmodernism had thrown the wrenches irreconcilably into the social sciences. It was the days when an anthropologist could still pretend to write an ethnography and when stories could be said to actually "tell" something. Now, two decades later, with Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault dead (and nobody, not even Claude Levi–Strauss, wanting to be the new guru of French Theory),
things seem to have calmed down and become more apparently matter–of–fact once again.
In the interim, both because of and despite all the heavy Theory I studied, I had learned a few
things about reading and writing,
things that made simple acts very complicated. But now I can also see
that there are some fundamental
things I learned about storytelling,
things that cut through the underbrush of theory, back to the days before I was even a student. One of them can be put very simply: Telling a story causes you to become its audience, and when you listen to yourself, you learn something about yourself
that you did not know before. (By "telling" and "listening," I also mean writing and reading.) To this basic truth about storytelling and writing, I would add another truth, this one gleaned from my childhood exposure to Shamanism: Serious storytelling not only has the potential to heal, it can and does heal. This is no surprise to those who practice psychoanalysis (either Jungian or Freudian), in which it is understood
that storytelling is a way for the unconscious to hide meaning from the conscious (Freud), or for the subconscious to send a message to the conscious (Jung). But what I did not realize, perhaps because I had been academically preoccupied all these years, was
that this sort of therapeutic storytelling happens all the time, not only in the context of therapy or meaningful conversation, not only in the language of dreams and disguised autobiographical writing, but in the way we go about living our everyday lives.
Let me look at two case studies, one I recall from my study of Anthropology and the other from my own life. Both cases involve childbirth and both involve the role of symbols and storytelling. Both have important, real–life consequences.
Case #1: Mother and Muu
In his famous essay, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," the Structuralist Anthropologist, Claude Levi–Strauss (considered by some to be the "father" of Narratology, the scientific study of storytelling), talks about Shamanism and psychotherapy. He describes and analyzes a shamanic healing ceremony practiced among the Cuna. The ritual involves the shaman singing a song whose story and symbolism help a mother through a difficult childbirth. By making use of a coherent and organized mythic story during the ritual, the shaman helps the mother through the painful ordeal of giving birth. Her pain is given meaning in a larger narrative of struggle among spirits, and when the story resolves in her favor, she is led into a psychological state
that has real effects on her body — she is able to relax, making the childbirth easier. Levi–Strauss observes:
The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed . . . .bring[ing] to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious . . . . The manipulation must be carried out through symbols,
that is, through meaningful equivalents of
things meant which belong to another order of reality.
The narrative in the Cuna ritual involves a personified spirit called Muu, whose role is to help nurture the fetus. In the painful childbirth, the Muu has gone beyond its usual role and also captured the soul of the mother, and the shaman must intercede, fighting the Muu with the help of other spirits in order to rescue the mother's soul and save the child. The performance of the ritual is emotional, vivid, dramatic, and specific. Personal, often intimate, details from the life of the mother are woven into the narrative as the shaman battles with the Muu.
For the Cuna, the ritual is straightforward. The narrative literally describes the battle, and the shaman's victory over the overreaching Muu is what saves mother and child. But as Levi–Strauss notes, an essential element in the shaman's treatment is to allow the unconscious to express itself in a way
that the conscious can understand. In the shamanic ritual, this involves the language of symbols —
things that have meaning because we have agreed upon the meanings attributed to them. What the Cuna play out literally is, by scientific standards, symbolic and figurative.
There is no Muu.
There is no battle of spirits. But playing out the drama performs a sort of therapeutic analogy.
Levi–Strauss compares the shaman's role to
that of the western psychotherapist, whose role is also to mediate between the patient's unconscious and conscious. He says, "in both cases the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious." In the same way
that the shaman's ritual begins with a narrative
that includes details specific to the patient's life, the psychotherapist evokes detailed narratives from the patient during treatment.
In psychoanalysis, a process called "abreaction" (which usually happens at a cathartic moment) discharges the negative emotions associated with trauma, whereas in a shamanic ritual, the patient's physical, psychological, or spiritual problems are discharged at a particularly intense juncture in the narrative. In both cases, an experience is "provoked" or evoked. The shaman is a vicarious narrator and the psychoanalyst is a listener, urging on the patient's narrative, and both achieve healing by facilitating communication between the unconscious and the conscious. In psychoanalysis, we talk about the conscious and the unconscious (or subconscious); in Shamanism, we talk about the world of humans and the world of spirits.
Now, whereas psychoanalysis is a private matter with the narrative happening behind closed doors, accessible only to the patient and doctor, Shamanism is radically different. In a shamanic ritual, the narrative is performed; it becomes known to an extended family or even an entire local community. In Korea, shamanic ceremonies are still held for the entire nation! (One might skeptically conclude
that the public nature of shamanic treatments should enhance the placebo effect through public pressure, but then perhaps this is also why psychotherapy is notoriously slow, expensive, and unreliable!)
Case #2: Stone Soup
Early in 1998, shortly after the birth of our daughter, my wife Anne began to use the phrase "stone soup" with annoying frequency. This was odd, because she had never, to my knowledge, used
that allusion before. Even odder was the fact
that she often alluded to stone soup inappropriately even after I pointed out to her,
many times,
that she was misusing it. She is a Ph.D. with finely–honed analytic skills and I teach Creative Writing, so such a lapse of judgment was pretty unusual. (If you are unfamiliar with the story of "Stone Soup," you may read it here).
The following month, bitter winter in Michigan, Anne began to bring home dark cherries from the supermarket. She has always hated cherries and does not eat them even now. She said she was buying them for me, and she thought it odd
that I would point out to her — given the trouble she had gone through —
that she had never bothered buying them for me in past winters. These were large, dark cherries, and I enjoyed them because they reminded me of my days in California's agricultural valley. I didn't protest after
that.
By March, Anne was bringing home rocks, actual rocks from the parking lots of K—Mart and other stores. I was alarmed, and reminded her
that what she was doing was illegal, and
that she could get in trouble if she got caught. But she was only bringing home a few stones at a time, she said. The stores wouldn't miss them, and she was going to line them up along the west side of the house to create a border for the garden she would plant in the spring. They were pretty stones, in a range of colors, about the size of mangoes, and Anne even drew the curved outline of the border she wanted to make, showing how attractively the stones would line up. I told Anne we could buy some rocks from a landscaping store if she wanted them so badly, but she continued to bring them home, a few at a time, under the front seat of the car.
The allusions to stone soup, the cherries, and the parking lot rocks continued together. In April, "the cruelest month," Anne went to the doctor, suffering terrible pains in her right side. She was diagnosed with gallstones and had to have immediate surgery.
If you were reading a short story now, you would probably find this sequence of events wrought with foreshadowing and symbolism, sort of like an overwritten Victorian novel full of implausible convolutions in plot and heavy–handed rhetoric. Perhaps you could then read the gallstones as divine punishment for the theft of parking lot rocks. Or you could read the purchase of cherries, which contain seeds called "pits" or "stones" as foreshadowing. Or the "stone soup" allusions — which have to do with the methodical, clever, and deceptive accumulation of material — could be foreshadowing. But this was reality.
While Anne was in the hospital, I did some web research and looked in some medical texts
that showed photographs of gallstones. When they clog the bile ducts, gallstones line up in curved formation, varying in color and shape pretty much like smooth garden stones. I discovered another surprise as I researched remedies for gallstones: one of the herbal remedies is black cherries. And as this connection got the gears turning in my associative mind, I made yet another connection. According to her doctor, Anne's gallstones were a result of her pregnancy (apparently, it is not unusual for a woman in her late 30s to get gallstones after having a baby). So this fact connected the cherries and the baby for me, reminding me of the folk tune "I Gave My Love a Cherry without a Stone." The song happens to end with the line, "I gave my Love a baby with no crying." Our daughter had not cried when she was born.
So what is one to make of this series of events? They confirmed for me the fact
that our lives are like badly written novels. Our lives are full of coincidences, synchronicities, odd insights, and weird incidents
that weave together into a continuous narrative around us. Like badly written novels, these life narratives are often heavy handed foreshadowings of important
things to come. If we pay attention while reading a novel — particularly to a series of associated odd events — they may give us clues to important negative or positive
things that come later in the text. Anne was trying to tell herself (and me)
that she had gallstones, but since we were living our lives and not reading a novel, the message was lost.
Since the gallstone incident, I have noticed this sort of thing happening all the time. If I go back and isolate a significant period in my life, whether it be the span of a few weeks or a timeframe of years, I can see the same kind of narrative structure revealing itself. It would be easy to stop here and invoke some sort of religious or cosmological answer, but I think the more useful answer is simpler: Pay attention to your actions because you are constantly communicating with yourself.
You are in a continuous symbolic performance, writing the story of your life as you live it. You do not need a shaman or a psychoanalyst to be your go–between, because most of the symbolic vocabulary you use is easily accessible to your conscious self if you
just read your own life slowly and attentively the way you might study a novel. In fact, the analogy works quite nicely: When you are truly engaged in a good novel, you lose sight of the fact
that you are reading; you are in the novel, so to speak, and all of its structures are invisible to you. By the same token, you lose sight of the structures of your own life story when you are excitedly engaged in living it. Slow down. Pause. Re–read. Remember.
Medical Narratology
Every writer knows
that writing is therapeutic, and even non–writers know
that the simple act of giving voice to your problems (or to the symptoms of your illness) makes
things a little better. All we need is someone who reads or listens. In some cases, sadly,
that someone is only ourselves. But now
there is a glimmer of hope from the medical profession, formerly notorious for its inability to listen.
Rita Charon, an M.D. and Ph.D., had a profound breakthrough when she made the connection between healing and storytelling. She says:
I realized
that what patients paid me to do was to listen very expertly and attentively to extraordinarily complicated narratives — told in words, gestures, silences, tracings, images, and physical findings — and to cohere all these stories into something
that made at least provisional sense, enough sense,
that is, to be acted on. I was the interpreter of these often contradictory accounts of events
that are, by definition, difficult to tell. Pain, suffering, worry, anguish, the sense of something
just not being right: these are very hard to nail down in words, and so patients have very demanding "telling" tasks while doctors have very demanding "listening" tasks.
Charon coined the term "narrative medicine" in her 2001 article in The Annals of Internal Medicine, but she had been working with patients and their telling of stories for several years by then. She was so convinced of the role of storytelling and listening
that she took the time to study literature and creative writing formally, getting a Ph.D. Her influence on the medical school at Columbia was great enough
that all second year medical students
there are now required to take a seminar on Narrative Medicine.
Charon's use of language is different from other doctors. Here, where she describes her interviewing of a patient, one can see her literary training quite clearly:
I listen not only for the content of his narrative but for its form — its temporal course, its images, its associated subplots, its silences, where he chooses to begin in telling of himself, how he sequences symptoms with other life events . . . . After a few minutes, he stops talking and begins to weep. I ask him why he cries. He says, "No one has ever let me do this before."
Rita Charon currently directs the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia. As you think of life as a novel, consider these interesting associations: Rita, in the Vedic tradition, is the principle of cosmic order
that gave rise to the idea of dharma (the idea of appropriate and virtuous behavior); Charon, in Greek mythology, is the ferryman who takes the spirits of the dead across the River Acheron. The spirits are brought to him by Hermes, the god whose symbol, the caduceus, happens to be the symbol of the western medical profession.
http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/rrS ... ling2.html 
