4th Global Conference
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Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 2: Identity, InterSubjectivity and Illness
Chair: Elisabeth Gedge
Shifting Views of Self: Impact of Chronic Illness
Diagnosis on Young Emerging Adult Women
Amy Rutstein-Riley
Liberal Arts Field Experience Coordinator, Lesley University,
Cambridge, MA, United States of America
This paper explores the impact of
illness experience and diagnosis (bipolar illness, depression, human
papilloma virus – HPV, and
chronic vulvar inflammation) on the developing identities of four young
emerging adult women, ages 18-24 years. Through a series of in-depth,
open-ended and semi-structured interviews conducted over a period of
eighteen months, Emma, Catherine, Molly and Genevieve discuss developing
views of self in relationship to health and illness, chronic illness
diagnosis, and their interactions with the US health care system. Meanings
ascribed to illness experiences and specifically, the impact of diagnosis
on views of self, body image, health practices and resulting health
decision-making and will be discussed.
Situated in grounded theory, narrative
inquiry, and qualitative feminist research methods, the final section
of this paper discusses the importance of understanding the intersection
between health, illness diagnosis, and developing views of self and the
social, behavioral and psychological negotiations young emerging adult
women undertake toward their pursuit of “healthy self” identities.
Implications for the care of young emerging adult women in the context
of their health care relationships underscores the importance of engaging
in dialogue on the meanings women ascribe to a sense of a “healthy
self” in the context of experiencing a chronic illness diagnosis.
Enabling young women to voice their views of self, the transitions associated
with a new illness diagnosis, and the impact of such experiences on their
bodies and the private and public worlds they inhabit will allow clinicians
to more fully communicate about and understand health beliefs, health
practices, and health decisions in which young emerging adult women engage.
Cancer & the Idea of the Self: Philosophy, Memoir,
and Medical Trauma
Marlene
Benjamin
Stonehill College, United States of America
In A PITCH OF PHILOSOPHY, Stanley Cavell writes that, if pressed “to give a one-clause sense of [ THE CLAIM OF REASON’s] reason for existing, it might have been: ‘to bring the human voice back into philosophy’” (Cambridge, 1994, p. 58). The goal is worthy, and worthy of various interpretations. Traditional, analytic philosophy is easily caricatured as “male”, while personal, or literary, narrative---often couched in, and concerned with, the language and experience of the body---is too easily dismissed as “female”. They are distinct modes of inquiry, with each offering its own particular lessons, and each suffering from methodologically-specific limitations. But they are not, as some philosophical understanding has it, mutually exclusive. Moreover, a combination of the two can, especially in cases of extremity, better inform our understanding of the relationship between character formation and the good human life. Interestingly, most such recognition itself comes in the form of traditional philosophical analysis alone. Yet demonstration of how a combination of literary and traditional analytic philosophy may achieve its conceived results is not often attempted, precisely because the spaces between the two forms of inquiry are viewed as distinct and unbridgeable. Still, such demonstration, an actual, rather than hypothetical, combination of both forms of inquiry, can more powerfully “make the argument”, opening the way to a kind of philosophizing more suited to the issues at stake and to the human experiences themselves. “Cancer & the Idea of The Self: Philosophy , Memoir, and Medical Trauma” attempts this kind of demonstration, aiming to track at least one route by which the human voice can be brought back into philosophy.
Suffering: Intersubjective and Narrative
Experience
Suzana Raluca Burlea
Université de Montréal, Montreal, Canada
While some scholars
studying suffering tend to concentrate on suffering as
object of political argument, of engaged action or discursive topics –
‘suffering at distance’ (Boltanski), - they take the risk of
neglecting the
bodily experience and the very language of suffering which manifests through
the immediate co-presence of suffering, the medium where its sharing may
become
effective or not. Our presentation will focus then on the mechanisms
and
conditions making possible suffering sharing and its limits.
The object
is the suffering experience and my aim is to explore, in a
theoretical review, the significance and limits of intersubjectivity
in the
suffering as subjective experience, inseparable of the physical pain.
Far from
being exclusively limited to the physical domain, physical pain is a ‘a
hurtful
mode of subjectivity; a way of being which is distorted, tortured, and
distressed’ (Van Hooft).
The discussion will be based on a phenomenological perspective and within
the
paradigm of embodiment (Henry; Csordas; Kotarba; Kleinman; Good; Bendelow
and
Williams; Jackson; Leder; Scarry et al.). This will lead to the comprehension
of suffering experience through a phenomenological description of pain
as an
embodied experience, and to the intersubjective dimension of suffering,
which
is constituted in the narrative experience of illness and suffering.
This approach will allow grasping the limits of intersubjectivity definitions
that are formulated by the symbolic interactionism scholars (Cooley,
Mead and
Blumer) and by those of the social phenomenology view (A. Schütz).
The main
problem with these views is the reflexive definition of intersubjectivity
either as ‘taking the role of the other’ or as an intentional
orientation Act
of temporal consciousness towards the other’s simultaneous consciousness,
without any concern to the embodied experience of intersubjectivity.
Defining
intersubjectivity from an embodied and preobjective perspective will
be a main
step in claiming that suffering, as an embodied and preobjective experience,
can be intersubjectively shared and constituted.
From E. Lévinas’ point of view the relation to the Other
has to be founded in
the expressive discourse actualizing the Other’s embodiment. It will
then
follow that discourse implies the intersubjective process and, in a second
moment, the embodied character of discourse.
1) Here, the domain to be studied is that
of illness narratives as the
one
capable of manifesting suffering narrative. The main focus will be on
eliciting
the intersubjective structure of illness narrative on the basis of its
dialogical structure and on the aesthetic reception theory. Scholars
in medical
anthropology and ethnography have also indicated the social polyphony
implied
in illness narratives and analysed the process of following experience
in
narrative reception.
2) Studies in cultural anthropology, cognitive
linguistics and psychiatry
have
demonstrated the embodied basis of language, metaphorical concepts and
linguistic metaphors, pointing at the same time to the already significant
social and cultural meaning of embodiment. Narrative studies have approached
the narrative constitution of experience and of social action.