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First Episode Psychosis: A Magical Realist Guide Through Liminal Terrain
Author(s) -
BarAm Sonja
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8438
pISSN - 0814-723X
DOI - 10.1002/anzf.1159
Subject(s) - liminality , narrative , psychoanalysis , identity (music) , metaphor , reading (process) , psychology , autoethnography , distancing , psychosis , active listening , aesthetics , sociology , psychotherapist , gender studies , literature , art , medicine , linguistics , pathology , philosophy , disease , covid-19 , psychiatry , infectious disease (medical specialty)
This paper presents a narrative of a client, ‘Eva’, who experienced what is termed by psychiatry a first episode psychosis. As a family and relationship counsellor practicing narrative therapy with its backdrop of post‐structuralism and curiosity of exploring new entry points for narratives of identity, I tentatively sought new ways to engage with Eva's story. My endeavour in meeting with ‘First Episode Psychosis’ is described through adopting a listening position from a reading of magical realist literature. This extends Michael White's political exploration of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep's liminal spaces (in the rites of passage metaphor) to understand units of experience, units of meaning, and the fluidity of identity in psychosis, which is contextualised as a response to events in the client's story.