Narrative Colonization

Within the depth-psychology and narrative-medicine corpus, Narrative Colonization designates the process by which institutionally dominant discourse — most paradigmatically the clinical gaze of modern medicine — appropriates, simplifies, and thereby subjugates the individual’s self-authored account of experience. Arthur Frank gives the term its most concentrated elaboration: modernist medicine’s reduction of the particular suffering body to a ‘unifying general view’ constitutes what he calls ‘a benevolent form of colonialism,’ and the ill person who accepts Parsons’s sick role consents to having individual particularity dissolved into medical generality. The colonization metaphor is deliberately political; it situates the patient’s story inside power relations analogous to those of imperial governance. The corpus registers two characteristic responses: the postmodern drive toward ‘reclaiming’ (Frank) and the quest narrative’s communicative reappropriation of the body-as-witness. Tension persists between the acknowledged benefits of clinical reduction — real cures, real science — and the psychic and ethical costs exacted from those condemned to chronic conditions for whom restitution is unavailable. Related pressures appear in Jungian-inflected readings of Canadian literature, where colonial history functions as the outer correlate of an inner psychic occupation, and in Abram’s argument that the textualization of oral narrative displaces the living landscape as mnemonic ground, enacting a further colonization of experiential knowledge.

In the library 12 passages

The colonization of experience was judged worth the cure, or the attempted cure. But illnesses have shifted from the acute to the chronic, and self-awareness has shifted. The post-colonial ill person, living with illness for the long term, wants her own suffering recognized in its individual particularity.

Frank’s foundational argument that modernity’s clinical reduction of individual suffering to general medical categories constitutes a colonization of experience whose cost becomes apparent only in the era of chronic illness.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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medical colonization during, 10-12; project endings in modernist thinking, 164; responsibility and professionalism, 15-16; telos of, 112-13.

Frank’s index cross-references medical colonization with modernity’s professional telos, embedding the concept within the broader critique of modernist rationalization.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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I saw St. Augustine transmitting the Christian creed to the Britons on the tips of Roman lances, and Charlemagne’s most glorious forced conversions of the heathen; then the pillaging and murdering bands of the Crusading armies.

Jung’s visionary sequence constructs a phenomenological image of historical colonization as the violent imposition of a foreign narrative upon indigenous peoples and their worldviews.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963supporting

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the dialectical confrontation of contemporary ‘civilisation’ and distant cultures or remote epochs has wrought a profound distortion on European notions of history and social development.

The passage situates colonial narrative distortion within European evolutionary teleology, whereby dominant civilizational stories colonize the meaning attributed to non-European and archaic cultures.

Jung, C. G., Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting

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Maskepetoon through his contacts with white traders and missionaries moved outside his traditional places, and saw things beyond the limits of his Indian culture that were impossible/unimaginable within it.

The analysis of Maskepetoon’s story exemplifies psychic narrative colonization, in which missionary and colonial contact dismantles the indigenous subject’s traditional cognitive and narrative universe.

Jung, C. G., Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997supporting

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Postmodern testimony speaks not in what Jean-François Lyotard called ‘grand narratives’ — the narratives of church, state, science, and medicine that held earlier societies and lives together; rather, it speaks in Felman’s bits and pieces.

Frank’s deployment of Lyotard positions grand institutional narratives — the very instruments of narrative colonization — as structures that postmodern testimony fragments and resists.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting

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Once the stories are written down, however, the visible text becomes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories — the inked traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly traces left by the animals.

Abram’s argument that alphabetic literacy displaces the living landscape as narrative ground constitutes a structural account of how textual colonization supplants oral, place-based story.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting

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We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities.

Sacks’s formulation of narrative as constitutive of personal identity provides the ontological stakes that make narrative colonization — the dispossession of that inner story — a fundamental threat to selfhood.

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985aside

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Writing is not, as it could be, a means of dissociation from one’s own body. Quest storytellers write of their own bodies, including pains and disfigurements, in sensuous detail.

Frank describes the quest narrative’s bodily re-inscription as a counter-practice to the dissociative effects of medical colonization, reclaiming authorship through embodied testimony.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995aside

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Language came to be the mediator between consciousness and the world, and reality became male. Magic gave way to reason; circles to lines; re-birth to renewal; timelessness to chronology.

The passage frames the historical shift from oral to written consciousness as a colonization of experiential reality by patriarchal-rational narrative, aligning with broader critiques of logocentrism.

Jung, C. G., Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930-1934, 1997aside

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Related terms