"Biographical Nadir" and Never-Ending Risk Among Graduates of "At-Risk Therapeutic Boarding Schools"

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Looking Back: Narrating and Learning

Abstract

This article examines the life stories of adults in Israel who were defined as "children at risk" in their childhood and were sent by court order to therapeutic boarding schools on the grounds of "bad parenting," "neglect," and "abuse".The main findings reveal how adults not only experience forced out of home placement as a life-event that has shattered their phenomenological self-evidence, but they also report a unique life-story structure that includes a biographical nadir. This narrative structutre also includes a constant reflexive preoccupation with the fear of "going backwards" to the biographical nadir, the and the need to invent critical concepts such as "good parenting" and continiuos reflexivity of personal risk.

Author

• Avihu Shoshana, University of Haifa