31 October 2019

This is a thought provoking, article by Michele Crossley of Manchester University. In it she describes the psychological tools we use to make sense of and navigate our lives. Key to being able to do this are ‘storytelling’ as this places us in time, connected to the past within a community, within a set or relationships and with a moral compass. This give us our self/identity it enables us to use the present to link to our past and project into our future and the sense of a meaningful life. But traumatizing experiences ‘have the capacity to painfully highlight the ‘normal’ state of narrative coherence.’ Trauma such as the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness disrupts the most basic existential assumptions people hold about themselves and the world. These are thrown into disarray and challenges the interconnectedness of body-self-world. We shocked out of complacency of an assumed futurity of our existence. It undermines all the effort and sacrifices directed towards a future which isn’t going to happen. ‘Without even realising it, before my diagnosis I had been living in an open, expansive, interior space. Now the walls and ceiling had moved uncomfortably close. Limits were everywhere I looked…Gone was my sense of feeling protected or secure. Gone, too, was any feeling of certainty about the future. As my treatment progressed these invisible looses were to become more painful, in some ways, than the outward, physical looses and privations of the disease and its remedies.’ Anne Dennison (1996) when diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

The article has given me an understanding of what happens to us psychologically at times of trauma and in particular how necessary it is to have mechanisms which allows us to create a narratives for ourselves  ‘people cope with the disruptive effects of pain, illness and traumatising events through storytelling narrative reconfiguring such stories are a vehicle for making sense of not just illness but life itself.’ 

This has made me think again about Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women’ and her explanation that following the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, revelations about the Holocaust and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that a whole generation lost faith in the future and humanity and it was not surprising that the Abstract Expressionists therefore turned away from using things as subject matter and instead explored their inner selves. Is this accepted theory? I must do some further investigation into this. It is very interesting in light of the Michele Crossley article but instead of an individual being traumatised and having to reconfigure their narrative a whole generation had to do it.

Seeing ‘Misbehaving Bodies’ at the Wellcome Collection for a second time, now with this article in mind it made me view the exhibition differently. Jo Spence’s work is so much about taking control of the narrative of her life and by doing so empowering herself as a woman. She tells her own – uncomfortable truth. In an age before social media, she was already challenging the concept a perfect life told through photography. in the work Family Album, she makes visible what is left out – divorce, tantrums and illness. She does the same with cancer, she retells the story of her cancer experience through her photographs. A question that arises is are artists particularly well placed to be able to do this because they create narratives through making work? This requires more investigation.

Crossley M L Narrative psychology, trauma and the study of self/identity Theory & Psychology, 2000 - journals.sagepub.com https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959354300104005