The Healing Effects of Storytelling: On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling in the Context of Research and Counseling

By G. Rosenthal. 2003

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Conducting a biographical-narrative interview is already a kind of psychological intervention. In this article, I will reflect on this. I will introduce the narrative-interviewing method and discuss the following: What processes are prompted for narrators when they tell their life story and for the interviewer guiding the conversation in a narrativebiographical style? What are the chances offered by this method of directing a conversation for setting off initial healing processes, and what are the risks and dangers involved? These questions are pursued, in particular, in the context of research interviews— especially in the context of my interviews with survivors of the Shoah and their children and grandchildren—but also in the context of counseling. I will also discuss the method’s limits in conversations with people experiencing acute life crises.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c81f0e4182c8bfb4f98860275e1d954ec7bfe35d