Meaning and Medicine in a New Key: Trauma, Disability, and Embodied Discourse Through Cross-Cultural Narrative Modes

摘要

In volume 34 of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, the featured Quote of the Volume (v 34, 2010) came from Sigmund Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes, "creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know of a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind, they are far in advance of us everyday people" (1962, p. 8). The Journal has, since the Editor-in-Chief took the reins, striven for greater inclusivity, and a greater understanding of the power of cultural construction and narrative. We emphasize that, as ЕЕ Evans-Pritchard noted in another of CMP's Quote of the Volume (CMP Volume 33, 2009), social systems are moral, not natural systems. That is, we study "societies as moral, or symbolic systems and not as natural systems,... (we) are less interested in process than in design, and that (anthropology) therefore seeks patterns and not laws, demonstrates consistency and not necessary relations between social activities, and interprets rather than explains" (1962, p. 62). This is precisely the point Geertz made 25 years later in his seminal work, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973).