Narrative Reflections

This very powerful book highlights the invisible line between broken hearts and open hearts. Painful stories eloquently told invite us to look unflinchingly into the heart of suffering and the humanity beyond. But just as important, we find out that the act of bearing witness, of approaching suffering with an open heart, changes us. And always for the better. -- Daniel Gottlieb Ph.D., Host of "Voices in the Family;" author of Family Matters
In these astonishing chapters, six therapists work through their own pain and suffering through intimate witnessing of the transcripts of three families in the Transcending Trauma Project. The reader encounters the courage that the reflectors movingly present. Positioned as witnesses, we too have an opportunity to observe what openhearted reading can bring to our lives. -- Kaethe Weingarten, PhD, director, The Witnessing Project, Berkeley, California
Michael White adapted what the anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff described as ‘definitional ceremonies’ in her fieldwork with Holocaust survivors in a California Old Folks center to become a central practice-outsider witnessing- of narrative therapy and community work. I find it a wonderful twist of fate that the authors of this book, children of survivors, adapt this and use it for their own purposes as they themselves become ‘outsider witnesses’ to the stories of their parent’s ‘survivor’ generation. If Michael and Barbara had survived to learn about this, I suspect they would have embraced each other as kindred spirits. -- David Epston, co-author with Michael White of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990) and Experience, Contradiction, Narrative and Imagination (1992)
The deeply inspiring essays in this volume clearly demonstrate the enormous healing power of human connections and bearing witness to the greatest atrocity of the twentieth century. Instead of focusing on the psychopathology, this group of experts listened and responded with their hearts. The reader will get a rare and invaluable look at the compassionate intertwining of pained lives and its triumphant aftermath. -- Ira Brenner, training and supervising analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, PA, and co-author with Judith Kestenberg of The Last Witness—The Child Survivor of the Holocaust
This remarkably sensitive study reports on mental health therapists venturing to examine their own empathic reactivity in listening to Holocaust survivors’ narratives bearing witness to their malignant victimization and suffering. This study richly furthers our understanding of how, if we allow it, our common humanity makes the suffering of another reverberate within oneself—and not only furthers our understanding of the other’s experience of trauma, but by allowing our empathic reactivity evoke in us self-exploration and reflectiveness makes us aware of our own traumatization, heightening our own humanity as clinicians. Perhaps a world filled with people willing to listen—for real—to the traumas of others would become a world of diminishing intentional traumatization. This is a welcome addition to our multifaceted study of the Holocaust, of genocide. -- Henri Parens, MD, professor of Psychiatry, Thomas Jefferson University; training and supervising analyst (adult and child), Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, PA; author of Renewal of Life—Healing from the Holocaust
Human beings have a deep need to tell our stories of suffering and survival, but there is something in our stories that can’t be told—something in us that transcends any story, but that, paradoxically, emerges and comes more clearly into focus precisely in the telling of and bearing witness to each other’s stories as the authors in Narrative Reflections have done. -- Elio Frattaroli, MD, psychoanalyst, author of Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain: Becoming Conscious in an Unconscious World