The Healing Power of Personal Narrative

Abstract

This study is an attempt to delineate the healing power of personal
narrative, and to identify autobiography as a genre based on the personal
narrative, recovered memories of psychological traumas and confessional mode,
can transform into therapeutic tools of purgation in art resulting in catharsis. In
psychological literature, autobiography is proved that human beings naturally
seek to understand how and why significant or life turning events happen in
their own lives or in the world they exist in. The autobiographical impulse has
undertaken to record the autobiographers' life stories as a form of self-therapy.
To construct a story of their lives and to compose memory, emotion and internal
experience as well as autobiographical facts into a story helps them to become
who they are. Storytelling is an important part of self-development, and the
narration that has gone awry can be addressed in psychotherapy. The
psychotherapists used to discuss how creative writing can help authors
articulate, accept and understand their vulnerability and suffering by releasing
their thoughts in the secure medium of art. Discussing the implication of
coherence for psychotherapy they maintain that constructing a personal story
facilitates the comprehension of significant experiences because the process of
writing allows the remembering of events during their organization in a
coherent fashion while integrating thoughts and feelings related to those events.
The study sets out to get the record right by redefining autobiography as healing
fiction –assigning to its writers a vital role in psychological rehabilitation

through the medium of art. Then it presents the theoretical questions and terms
concerning autobiography as a genre. The aim is to locate this study within its
literary, psychological, socio-cultural, contexts to validate the central concept of
- the healing power of autobiography and its implication to the individual and
community alike.