Expectations between Doctors and Patients: Positive Outcomes in Therapeutic Narrative

• In Event: A Future between Hope and False Hope: Medical Humanities in Fiction and Film, East and West

Abstract

In light of his post-Freudian, Foucauldian deconstruction practice of narrative therapy, Australian therapist Michael White advocates the use of multi-storied conversations to draw positive outcomes from storytelling treatment, instead of reinforcing patient’s negative psychological and physiological problems. This approach is particularly important in the increasingly tense doctor-patient relationship in mainland China today. Chinese writer-doctor Bi Shumin’s _Save the Breast_ (Zhengjiu rufang, 2003), named “the first Chinese psychotherapy novel by a psychologist,” relates an experimentation of narrative therapy with a group of patients to deal with the biopolitics of breast cancer as both social stigma and physio-psychic trauma against the tide of medical marketing.
In the novel, the doctor consistently encourages her clients to work with her in the quest for a second life. She employs “re-authoring” dialogues to help them spot omissions in their stories that are essential to their life struggles. The therapeutic narrative conversations are often begun by her asking questions that would create an opening to retrieve forgotten events or suppressed memories and to recruit alternative experiences. As a result, the female patient-protagonists are released from the prison of the past and regain the authorship of their lives. It then turns into a call for complaints about physicians’ arrogance, indifference, inhumaneness and, most seriously in China, corruption. People have now become conscious that they are not only patients but also patrons in a clinical encounter; they are clients or, more precisely, customers in the market economy. In the end, however, can positive outcomes resolve the general mistrust of doctors and their pharmaceutical agents?

Author

• Howard Y. F. Choy, Hong Kong Baptist University