Storytelling & Healing

by Heinz Insu Fenkl

The Journal of Mythic Arts, 2006

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 psycho-
analysis (either Jungian or Freudian), in which it is under-
stood 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 preoccu-
pied 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 conse-
quences.

Case #1: Mother and Muu

In his famous essay, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," the
Structuralist Anthropologist, Claude Levi–Strauss (consider-
ed by some to be the "father" of Narratology, the scientific
study of storytelling), talks about Shamanism and psycho-
therapy. 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

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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 child-
birth easier. Levi–Strauss observes:
The shaman provides the sick woman with a
language, by means of which unexpressed, and other-
wise 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

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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 break-
through when she made the connection between healing and
storytelling. She says:

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 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."

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 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.

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