ABSTRACT
Literature has an ingenious capacity to articulate human beings’ ‘vulnerable complexity’, to borrow words from poet John O’Donohue (1999: 14), and it is the desire to understand this complexity that energizes narrative approaches to medicine. This chapter examines the interface between medicine and literary arts through the case study of ‘expressive and reflective writing’ (ERW), as a practice offered to patients in clinical settings. I describe and engage with a range of writing techniques from a practitioner’s point of view and examine the practice’s historical development and its identity in relation to clinical and other therapeutic modes. The notion of ‘the patient’s point of view’ will be considered throughout, particularly in terms of how is it articulated, interpreted, heard and responded to. Patients’ perspectives in this chapter are represented through their own writing and comments, in addition to published works of fiction and poetry in which the rôles of writer, patient and doctor overlap. While acknowledging that these identities and their attendant narratives are interdependent and that they change, for the purposes of this chapter I will consider them as discrete entities. I consider how ERW provokes a challenge to biomedical definitions of health and therapeutic and how this facilitated literary art can contribute to these aims by expanding definitions, opening up creative and discursive spaces in clinical settings and allowing patients opportunities to be experts in their own stories.
