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EMPLOTMENT AND THERAPEUTIC INTERACTION:
PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOTIVES IN MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHERYL MATTINGLY

Abstract
This article focuses on the phenomenological aspects of Cheryl Mattingly’s empirical research. Cheryl Mattingly is one of the brightest representatives of modern American medical anthropology. Medical anthropology – actively developing social science – often, especially since the end of the 80-ies of the last century, refers to the conceptual resources of phenomenological philosophy to justify their methodological and value priorities. Such reference is connected with the attention of medical anthropologists to the subjective experience of illness and health, to the meaning of suffering, to patients’ storytelling, to situational effects of clinical interactions, to the changes in the life-world of man caused by serious chronic diseases. The first part of the article explicates the theoretical framework of the version of the applied phenomenology, which is offered by Mattingly in her long-term research conducted in 1990s and 2000 years. The subject of these research works was clinical interactions between occupational therapists and their patients. The analysis of these interactions is based on Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenologically grounded thesis that between the narrative and the experience of time there is an isomorphism thanks to the binding force of the plot. Mattingly brings the concept of narrative and a series of accompanying characteristics from the sphere of philosophical narratology to the sphere of phenomenology of (inter)action. The main idea of Mattingly is that the action itself has a narrative structure, – in the sense that actors themselves perform emplotment of interaction, configure the current events in a way that they are built into a whole, namely therapeutic history in which each successive episode of therapy follows from the previous one. The second part of the article illustrates on example of real therapy session how these ideas work in practice, in the process of the interpretation of particular therapeutic interactions. In general, we are planning to show that, although Mattingly’s appeal to phenomenological context is not systematic, and it is more correct to speak of the phenomenological “motives” in her work, it can be treated as one of the most interesting applications of phenomenological philosophy in the field of social sciences.

Key words
Therapeutic interaction, narrative, practice, time, experience, phenomenology, emplotment.

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