Within the depth-psychology and humanistic medicine corpus, illness narratives occupy a pivotal position at the intersection of embodied experience, ethics, and social meaning-making. Arthur W. Frank’s foundational taxonomy — restitution, chaos, and quest narratives — provides the field’s most theoretically elaborated framework, situating these stories not as mere reports of suffering but as the primary medium through which ill persons reconstitute identity, reclaim subjectivity from medical colonization, and discharge moral witness to a postmodern world. The corpus reveals a persistent tension between narrative typology as heuristic listening device and the irreducible particularity of individual experience. Frank insists his three types function as analytical scaffolding, not as sovereign categories. A second major tension runs between the testimonial function of illness narratives — their capacity to communicate embodied truth that exceeds propositional language — and the tendency of professional culture to reduce stories to extractable information. Arthur Kleinman’s parallel emphasis on suffering, healing, and the human condition provides a clinical counterpart to Frank’s more sociologically inflected account. Across both strands, the corpus is consistent on one point: illness demands stories, and the quality of those stories constitutes an ethical, not merely aesthetic, measure of how persons inhabit suffering.