Érudit's RSS Feed

Introduction

Léonore Brassard, Véronique Guyaz, Simon Harel, Clarence Lampron and Catherine Mavrikakis

Introduction

Léonore Brassard, Véronique Guyaz, Simon Harel, Clarence Lampron and Catherine Mavrikakis

La sociologue, la patiente, l’accompagnante

Patricia Paperman
This text intersects different visions of care that I have been able to adopt depending on the circumstances: as a hospital patient, a caregiver of a friend in a nursing home, and a sociologist whose work seeks to identify and clarify the notion of care. Drawing on these different aspects of my personal experience allows me to acknowledge and convey the moral complexity of care situations.

À bord de la van life : pour une écriture nomade en médecine narrative

Vincent Laliberté
As a psychiatrist at a shelter, I accompanied Claude, a homeless man. His dream to travel to South America in his van inspired me to develop nomadic writing in narrative medicine. This approach, derived from the therapeutic encounter, seeks to go beyond biomedical categories to express something about the other in their uniqueness and potential for becoming. One possible strategy is to meet the patient outside institutional clinical settings, paying attention to their concrete relationships. Nomadic writing in narrative medicine also aims to unleash the creative potential of writing itself as an artistic process, transcending the lived experience of illness or the critical analysis of the therapeutic context. This approach could prove particularly useful in psychiatry and with people in situations of social marginalization, thus opening up new perspectives for care.

Le récit lors de la prise de décision partagée en médecine : comment s’exercer pour mieux dialoguer

Marie-Chantal Fortin, M.D., Ph.D., F.R.C.P.(c) CHUM and Marie-Françoise Malo
The need to make health services more patient-centered is the subject of many conversations about the reforms needed for a more adequate, humane and respectful health service. This article begins with a historical perspective of the history of medicine, medical ethics and the social relationship to narrative, before discussing the difficulty of applying these notions to the field of transplantation and also the gaps in their implementation. Finally, it explores how integrating creative writing workshops into the care pathway could be helpful for a patient-centered approach.

Entends-tu ce que ton regard voit deux fois ? : risquer la bévue

Jennifer Bélanger
This article, which draws on my experience as a literary researcher in medical humanities and as a caregiver to my friend Caroline, makes the wager of a form of reflective medicine in light of this accompaniment centered around reading, writing, and food. Indeed, it traces a winding path marked by the use of quotations from various sources: books read during Caroline’s hospitalization, sentences she wrote or that I wiped from her blotting, sated lips, in the hope of a concert of voices where women’s throats, dog jaws, and insect wings attune. In this living ecology which establishes, for its survival, the imperative to “resonate with” and “eat with” others, I explore the “blunder” as a creative line of flight within my argument: understood not in the sense of vulgarity, but in the sense of seeing twice, of seeing oneself twice. The blunder becomes a strategy for rethinking certain clinical and discursive practices by highlighting the importance of stuttering, hesitant interactions which decenter us. Not seeking to return to the “who” imposed by an individualizing model of care, I multiply the loci of enunciation of the illness to include the song of other forms of life and invite the reader to hear, within themselves and beyond themselves, what their ears, redirected by a broader view of the world, may perceive through the voices of women writers experiencing illness.

Les ateliers d’écriture à la Maison de soins palliatifs Saint-Raphaël

Catherine Courteau and Achille Volpi
Since 2023, at the St-Raphaël Palliative Care Home in Montreal, Dr. Catherine Courteau (palliative medicine) and Achille Volpi (palliative care acupuncturist) have been offering writing workshops inspired by narrative medicine. Designed for end-of-life patients, caregivers, and the bereaved, they allow them to explore illness and grief through the Amherst Writers & Artists method and personal narratives. Here, we hope to share one of our workshops, which aim to provide a safe space to reconstruct disrupted life stories, strengthen resilience, and preserve dignity. Structured around various themes, the workshops encourage introspective reflection and non-judgmental sharing, transforming writing into a tool for continuity and humanization.

Le care comme éthique du savoir : les métaphores échouées de Jamaica Kincaid

Sharon Marquart
Long-term feminist thinking associates care with an approach to ethics that is situated, contextualized and entangled in the disorders of the living world. Through a study of the text My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid, this article considers the commentary on the experience of familiar caregivers which allows us to develop the ethics of knowledge, that I call “knowing with care.” Metaphor is a key figure that Kincaid’s writing simultaneously refuses and invokes in her text when she bears witness to the extreme bodily vulnerability of her brother dying of AIDS. I propose that these “failed” metaphors highlight the simultaneity of ethics and epistemology in a traumatic context such as the AIDS epidemic. A knowledge of care concerns the capacity to inhabit such disorienting moments and to face the vulnerabilities and uncertainties that these relational moments reveal.

Borderline et quelques limites de la psychiatrie

Laurence Laneuville
This article explores the role of literature in the psychiatric stance. The autofictional narratives of Marie-Sissi Labrèche, Borderline, and Michelle Lapierre-Dallaire, Y-avait-il des limites si oui je les ai franchies c’était par amour ok, show that “attention to language, to delirium, [and] to creation” (McDuff 2024: 5) brings new dimensions to a clinical encounter. In this magnificent “dilation” and “densification” (McDuff 2024: 7) that the use of literary language allows, the psychiatrist becomes more attentive to the other. However, translation between literary and biomedical languages becomes necessary, which raises a dilemma regarding the authenticity of one’s discourse. Existentially, we are all, in different ways involved in this quest for expression through language; to say, to say well, precisely, to repair, honor, or soothe. To search for and find one’s words is a bit like searching for and finding the other.

La vie comme une question sans réponse : les mots de la maladie dans le Journal de Marie Uguay

Élisabeth Chevalier
This article questions the discourse on illness in Marie Uguay’s Journal, a work based entirely on the experience of cancer and the attempt to overcome it in writing. The disease appears in particular terms and procedures in that the journal omits medical and technical vocabulary, reports of visits and treatment. This omission, which is somewhat surprising given the conventions of the diary genre, reveals a conception of language which avoids scientific objectivity, the quantifying, decisive gaze that medicine can pose. In an unstable relationship with the illness (sometimes attempting to explain it, sometimes avoiding any explanation) and with the reader of this written diary, Marie Uguay moves through language as though towards her destiny, in a tragic daily experience, which only her voice, open to life and desire, can express.

Expérience narrative d’une relation troublée au monde : le récit fragmentaire comme espace de cohabitation et de reliaison

Charlotte Bonnefon
The onset of an anxiety attack disrupts the spatial grasp of the world and invites us to focus our attention on what soothes it, the non-human environment (Searles 1960). From this experience arises the desire to translate the disorder, outside the linear framework of the narrative. Fragmentary writing, through its non-totalizing vision, creates a decentering of the traumatic event off-frame, focusing attention on what can be assembled in a dynamic relationship. A relationship constructed through back-and-forth movement between writing and reading in the uncharted space of the unconscious, making room for moments of suspension and latency to engage in stories not fixed once and for all but resonate from one unconscious to another, and grow like life itself. Fragmentary writing, through its work of editing and connection, thus appears as a form of narrative ecology, creating empathetic connections with others and the environment and acting as a means of reconciliation with the world.

Écouter avec les yeux de Rembrandt : esquisse théorique de l’expérience picturale chez Jean Genet et Mathieu Leroux

Benjamin Gagnon Chainey
This article proposes a cross-reading of two texts by Jean Genet relating to the work of Rembrandt and its aesthetic effects on its spectators ―“Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes” and “Le secret de Rembrandt”―with the contemporary autopathography Camouflé dans la chair, by Quebec author Mathieu Leroux. The aim of the article is to outline a theory of the “pictorial experience” in a hospital context: the embodied sensation of becoming the character in a painting, a sensory experience through which one can recontextualize, understand and criticize, in a manner that is both aesthetic, anachronistic and transhistorical, the subordinate position in which the medical hierarchy often confines the sick body.

Blood Quantum et Ekoci Nehirowatcihotan : perspectives autochtones sur les moments crise

Isabelle St-Amand
Through an analysis of Jeff Barnaby’s (Miq’maw) feature film Blood Quantum and references to Alexandre Nequado’s (Atikamekw) video work Ekoci Nehirowatcihotan, this article offers a reflection on care relationships, disease management, and the metaphor of the epidemic to better reflect on the impact of colonialism on Indigenous communities and individuals. By transposing these works within an artistic affiliation with Alanis Obomsawin’s tradition of resistance documentary filmmaking, and by creating a dialogue with a theoretical corpus of Indigenous studies (Whyte, Raheja, Robinson) and ethical philosophy (Tessman), the article shows how these films offer an aesthetic and political commentary on our shared history and the ills that afflict us in different ways. The notion of crisis is invoked, against the backdrop of the pandemic, to demonstrate how Indigenous cinema attempts to make sense of and transform moments of crisis.

De son vivant : le cinéma comme lieu de vulnérabilité

Céline Tisseur
This article explores how cinema can represent and convey illness through the film During his lifetime. Indeed, although patients are the most legitimate voices for discussing their experiences, cinema can offer opportunities to make illness visible and heard. Through the devices used in the film, director Emmanuelle Bercot addresses the experience of living with illness, in terms of the relationship with the body, solitude and waiting, as well as the relationship with loved ones and healthcare professionals. In front of the moving images, which half-show rather than attempt to reveal everything, the viewer is led to reflect on their own mortality. Cinema can offer a delicate and nuanced representation of the experience of illness, using aesthetic devices that make this experience tangible for the viewer.

Épitaphes

Sophie René de Cotret
Each moment of a serious illness is an inaudible death, a grieving process that is sometimes slow, sometimes sudden. “Epitaphs” traces each of the stages experienced by a young adult with cancer, starting from her diagnosis. The distorted nature of time, like the illness itself, underscores that the “ill” experience has a duration of its own. In the form of a diary, the text offers the perspective of the person suffering from cancer on both the illness and the care that is inevitable, but not without consequences.

Les patients impossibles : Kathy Acker et Antonin Artaud, monstres du médical

Hugo Satre
Focusing on the figures of Antonin Artaud and Kathy Acker, this article examines the link between self-writing and the experience of illness. Effecting what it calls “a return of the pendulum” — the passage from a certain theoretical tendency of exploring the practice of writing as a lenitive practice towards the literature and the texts of the two writers, which respectively explore the radicality of a refusal — this article examines the ontological crisis precipitated by their respective notebooks. In fact, for both Artaud and Acker, care involves remaining at the heart of this problem, insofar as illness is not seen as the first or last stage of a bodily condition that is either healthy or dead. It entails regarding the disfigured face of the ill not as an assault on a body that ought to be healthy or dead, but as a literary work.

Le voyage à Tulsa ou la maladie de l’Idéal : de Bob Dylan à Patricia Hale

Simon Harel
This article relates the author’s trip to Tulsa for a Bob Dylan conference, which led him to the Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa, where he had a dazzling encounter with the ghostly figure of Patricia Hale. The latter becomes the starting point for a personal reflection on literary accompaniment and its vicissitudes when it comes to diminished narrative voices. Drawing on the photographs and journals of V.S. Naipaul’s first wife, the author attempts to trace her voice in its absence and even its reticence, both in her husband’s writing and even in her own, which took an autobiographical form. In doing so, the author continues to reflect on the notion of the dedicatee and the function of the Ideal in his relationship to care, topics already explored in his previous writings, and thus questions his own essayistic practice as well as the idea of ventriloquized speech.

J’aurais voulu dire… Confessions d’un bon patient

Paul H. Cormier
The narrator addresses a cast of characters — more precisely, caregivers in the healthcare system who have attended to him over the past six decades. He tells them things he regrets not having said at the time. Snapshots are interspersed with more elaborate narratives. A confrontation about levels of care leads to a fundamental caregiver-patient discussion. A professional crush evokes care as a form of love.

Charest, Paul. Modes d ’exploitation du loup-marin sur la Côte-Nord du Saint-Laurent de la préhistoire à aujourd’hui. Québec, Les Éditions GID, 2023, 756 p. (ISBN : 978-2-89634-538-0).

Morgane Gauvin