Det sårbara narrativet

Reflections on the "broken" ontology that makes us human

Abstract

What exactly is a story? What kind of knowledge about human life can narrative offer? These questions are put to the fore when narrative medicine is introduced in a health care context. In “The vulnerable narrative: Reflections on the ‘broken’ ontology that makes us human” I outline a “critique” of the concept of narrativity and argue that narrative does not offer a new and better cognitive basis for healthcare than the dominant bio-medical paradigm, but instead should be given a mediating role based on the ability to connect the ”two cultures”. Human time appears as a ”third” historical time, where the story inscribes the phenomenological experience of time in the objective cosmologically grounded time. The ”broken” ontology and the vulnerability that can be said to be characteristic of such a narrative mediation has something important to say about the human condition – and the vulnerability that makes us human.