Conference Themes
Many if not most psychiatric disorders are characterised by an inability to regulate, tolerate, or respond appropriately to feelings. Often patients with these problems will give an account of their affective states and motives which takes the form of a narrative which assimilates salient affective episodes into a more or less coherent autobiography.
In this respect patients do not differ from non-patients. It seems most people rely on a narrative framework to interpret episodes of feeling by assimilating them to a story in which the subject is, if not the star, at least a major protagonist. The problem for patients is often not that they have false beliefs (although they do) but that their stories are dysfunctional in the broadest sense of the term. In the context of the patient’s life they lead to “problems in living” as Sasz put it.
This suggests that understanding many psychiatric disorders involves understanding the nature of narrative itself, its role in interpreting feeling states and shaping behaviour.
This conference examines that idea in the context of recent philosophical work on narrative. The resurgence of interest in narrative in philosophy has thrown up a number of themes of direct relevance to psychiatry. Areas of controversy in philosophy which are directly relevant are: the nature of the self. Is it constructed by narrative processes? The relationship between feeling and narrative in self understanding. Do we come to understand the meaning of our feelings by situating them in a narrative as Peter Goldie among others has argued? Even more fundamentally, what are narratives and how do they work, psychologically as well as aesthetically? Are there rules or principles of narrative construction used by the mind to interpret experience? Do psychiatric patients violate these rules in characteristic ways or is the incongruity of their first personal accounts a consequence of the experiential raw material of their narratives? At the same time philosophy in this area needs to be informed by a much deeper engagement with clinical and experimental work.
Final Conference Programme
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Day One: 12 October 2012 (Institute of Philosophy, room G22/26)
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09.15
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Arrival, registration
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10.00 - 12.00
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Session 1: Feeling and Narrative
Matthew Ratcliffe - 'Existential Feeling and Narrative in Psychiatric Illness'
Greg Currie - 'Narratives'
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12.00 - 13.00
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Lunch
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13.00 - 15.00
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Session 2: Feelings, Selves and Narratives: Case Studies
Konrad Michel - 'Narratives of existential crises: Suicide'
Giancarlo DiMaggio - 'Personality Disorders'
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15.30 - 17.00
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Session 3: Narrative in Forensic Psychiatry
Gwen Adshead: 'Their dark materials: narrative and identity in men who have killed'
Matthew Broome: 'Emotional regulation and the development of psychiatric disorders'
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Day Two: 13 October 2012 (Institute of Philosophy, room 349)
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09.30 - 11.30
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Session 1: Children's Understanding and Regulation of Feeling
Paul Harris - 'The child's understanding of feeling'
Marc de Rosnay - 'The child's regulation of feeling'
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12.00 - 13.30
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Session 2: Philosophy and Psychiatry I
Hanna Pickard: 'Narraitve understanding, narrative excuses: reflections on the role of narrative in recovery from PTSD and PD'
Lisa Bortolotti: 'Narratives and distorted memories'
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13.30 - 14.30
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Lunch
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14.30 - 16.00
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Session 3: Narrative psychiatry
Philip Gerrans - 'Delusion and narrative'
Charles Fernyhough - 'Narrative and Memory'
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16.30 - 17.30
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Final Session: Philosophy and Psychiatry II
Jon Jureidini - 'Reflections and general discussion'
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