The Group, The Photograph, The Wound, and the Writing: How a Social Worker Uses Narrative Medicine to Facilitate Groups

ABSTRACT

A clinical social worker/psychotherapist demonstrates the use of the narrative method in working with groups. The foundational concepts of “attention, representation and affiliation” will be discussed and applied throughout the article. The pivotal choice of texts and prompts and their relation to trauma will be explicated. Case illustrations are provided that relate to practice of the narrative method with a group of women who are coping with chronic illness and with administrators and providers in a nursing home dedicated to the care of individuals who are experiencing dementia.

KEYWORDS:

• Braille
• cancer
• groups
• narrative medicine
• texts

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynn Sara Lawrence

Lynn Sara Lawrence, MS, MS, is a graduate of Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Program (MS, 2012) and also holds a master’s degree in social work (Columbia, 1973). Currently, she is coediting the first book on narrative social work written and edited by social workers, in contract with Columbia University Press. Publications include “Merge or Purge: Challenges of Treating an Identical Twin with an Eating Disorder”; most recently, her poem “A Birthday Poem,” honoring Martin Bergmann, was published in the Psychoanalytic Review (April 2014). She has taught at the New York School for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and presented at national psychotherapy conferences, including The Examined Life Conference in Iowa (2012) and in the first International Conference on Narrative Medicine in London (2012). She has cofacilitated workshops at Mount Sinai with the Fellows in palliative care and was a course assistant in the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University. She has a private practice in New York City.