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Qualitative Inquiry
DOI: 10.1177/1077800403254888
2003; 9; 915Qualitative Inquiry
Gabriele Rosenthal
Research and Counseling
The Healing Effects of Storytelling: On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling in the Context of
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10.1177/1077800403254888QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 2003Rosenthal / THE HEALING EFFECTS OF STORYTELLING
The Healing Effects of Storytelling:
On the Conditions of Curative Storytelling
in the Context of Research and Counseling
Gabriele Rosenthal
University of Göttingen
Conducting a biographical-narrative interview is already a kind of psychological intervention.
In this article, I will reflect on this. I will introduce the narrative-interviewing
method and discuss the following: What processes are prompted for narrators when they
tell their life story and for the interviewer guiding the conversation in a narrativebiographical
style? What are the chances offered by this method of directing a conversation
for setting off initial healing processes, and what are the risks and dangers involved?
These questions are pursued, in particular, in the context of research interviews—
especially in the context of my interviews with survivors of the Shoah and their children
andgrandchildren—but also in thecontextof counseling. I will also discuss themethod’s
limits in conversations with people experiencing acute life crises.
Keywords: biographical-narrative interview; narrative questioning; the healing
effects of storytelling; acute life crises
Many social researchers assume that qualitative or open research interviews
cannot trigger processes of change in the interviewees. The notion that
in qualitative social research we should and would also avoid interventions is
not only thoroughly naïve, but it also shows a really comfortable position and
a lack of sensitivity for the processes in an interview with an open method for
guiding a conversation. With this position, the social researcher is not called
to reflect on what his or her conversations can bring about and to thereby also
see to it that the conversations he or she is guiding are supportive rather than
burdensome for the interviewees. When we conduct biographical interviews,
we particularly have to take into consideration the considerable psychological
effects telling one’s life story1
can have.
For more than 20 years I myself have been conducting biographicalnarrative
interviews with the most diverse types of groups of people;2
furthermore,
I advise colleagues who use this instrument for research purposes
or also in a modified form for counseling purposes and who, similar to me,
work with the narrative-conversation-guiding method in the field of research
915
Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 9 Number 6, 2003 915-933
DOI: 10.1177/1077800403254888
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supervision. My interviews with survivors of the Shoah and their children
and grandchildren, which I conducted between 1989 and 1996 in Germany
and in Israel (Rosenthal, 1998), but also my interviews with World War I veterans
who had returned home traumatized from the trenches (Rosenthal,
1991) are what particularly led me to continually think about the effect of this
method of guiding a conversation and to above all, broaden the questioning
techniques (see the following). My experiences and primarily the victims’
feedback, in some cases taking place over years, regarding the effects these
conversations had on them and also on the family dialogue convinced me
how just one or two biographical interviews can already trigger the first curative
processes.3
For a year I have also been conducting interviews with people
whohave fled fromtheir native countries andareseekingasylumin Germany
or who live here in a thoroughly uncertain situation with a short-term residence
permit—for example, refugees from Kosovo (Rosenthal, 2002). These
people are experiencinganacute life crisis. In this case, considerable limits are
placed on how one guides a biographical-narrative conversation. What to
date has been considerably questioned in these conversations is the certainty
regarding how I guide a conversation and the positive effects of recounting
one’s sufferings as well as traumatizing experiences and life phases. I grew
conscious of how I find certain conversation-guiding techniques important,
techniques that, however, are not possible in these conversations. This caused
me on the one hand to think about the rules for guiding a conversation and on
the other hand about the limits of my very positive experiences regarding the
helpful or curative effect of recounting, which I already described many years
ago (Rosenthal, 1995). It became clear to me that my optimistic position
regarding recounting came from the fact that I had to date interviewed a very
specific circle of people: namely, people who due to man-made disasters—
such as World War I or being persecuted during National Socialism—had
already been traumatized decades ago in their youth or as young adults and
who had since then again more or less established a certain lifestyle for themselves,
who had worked, married, become parents and grandparents, and so
on. In other words, they in the meantime again lived in a more or less established
present and future.4
In this respect, their situation was very different
from the people I presently question. But, what they share is that their suffering
is embedded in a collective experience whose concealment is neither privately
nor publicly—even under the threat of violence—called for and whose
disclosure as well as the naming of the perpetrator is not accompanied by
feelings of guilt. That is why what they say about the acts of violence they
experienced is not comparable with disclosing traumatizations in people
who during their childhood experienced family or sexual violence. Here, the
trauma therapists Luise Reddemann and Ulrich Sachsse (1996; also see
Sachsse, 1999) rightlywarnedof atraumaexposition thattakes place too early
and is not properly prepared for and pointed out the dangers of retraumatization.
Very carefully guiding a conversation in a way that supports recounting
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so as to get closer to traumatizing experiences is, however, also valid for people
in acute life crises. A considerable balancing act is required between supporting
narratives about the traumatizing life phase and simultaneously
holding back so that the narrators do not unexpectedly delve too deeply into
their sufferings and in the talk or thereafter find themselves overwhelmed by
traumatic memories. At the end of my article, I will discuss the possibilities
for carefully guiding a narrative-supporting conversation for people in acute
life crises. However, first the rules for guiding a biographical-narrative conversation
withpeople inastable life situation should bepresented; thekindof
questioning techniques we use to conduct biographical-narrative interviews
will be shown. Thereafter, I will discuss the possibilities for first curative processes
that can be gently employed. These processes cannot, of course, be
treated as equivalent to the processes during psychotherapy carried out over
a longer period of time. Nonetheless, our experiences with comprehensive
biographical narratives or also with guiding biographical-narrative conversations
for counseling purposes show how first curative effects can already
start here and above all, the positive effects these talks have on the family dialogue
and also in turn on the individuals.
HOW TO CONDUCT A
BIOGRAPHICAL-NARRATIVE INTERVIEW
Fritz Schütze (1976, 1983) already introduced the biographical-narrative
interview method in the 1970s; in the meantime, and particularly in Germany,
it has established itself as an interview method in more than just the field of
sociological biography research and has also in terms of the increase in questioning
techniques been further developed (Rosenthal, 1995).5
Most people who pursue this type of research first take into consideration
independent of their social science questions the entire life story both in terms
of its genesis and how it is constructed in the present. That is why when one
first conducts interviews and reconstructs life stories, one does not restrict
oneself to parts or individual phases of the biography. Observing individual
areas of life or individual phases in life in terms of the biography’s entire context—such
as, for example, the migration process or having been persecuted—can
first take place after the entire life story’s structure or Gestalt and
the whole life narrative has been taken into consideration.
At the beginning of each individual interview, we6
generally requested the
following of the biographer:
Please tell me/us your family story and your personal life story; I/we am/are
interested in your whole life. Anything that occurs to you. You have as much
time as you like to tell it. We/I won’t ask you any questions for now. We/I will
just make some notes on the things that we would like to ask you more about
later; if we haven’t got enough time today, perhaps in a second interview.7
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This request to hear the interviewee’s family history and life story is generally
followed by a long biographical narration (i.e., biographical selfpresentation),
often lasting for hours. This so-called main narration is at no
time interrupted by questions from the interviewers, but instead, it will only
be supported by paralinquistic expressions of interest and attentiveness such
as “mhm” or during narrative interruptions through motivating incitements
to continue narrating, such as “And then what happened?,” through eye
contact and other physical signs of attention.
As I will still explain, this phase of the conversation is of great advantage
for traumatized people when we later try to initiate further narrations. It is
first during the interview’s second phase that narrative-generating questions
are posed. This does not mean asking questions about opinions or reasons
(“Why did you . . . ?;” “Why did you do that?;” and “Why did you want
to . . . ?”); it instead means encouraging people to narrate about phases in their
life or particular situations.
Questions are oriented in the following ways:
1. Addressing a phase of the interviewee’s life: “Could you tell me more about the
time when you were (a child, in school, pregnant etc.)?” Or, indicating interest in
the process: “Could you tell me more about your time in the army, perhaps from
the first days until the end of your training?”
2. Addressing a single theme in the interviewee’s life by opening a temporal space:
“Could you tell me more about your parents? Perhaps from your earliest memories
till today.”
3. Addressing a specific situation already mentioned in the interview: “You mentioned
situation x earlier, could you tell me/narrate in more detail what exactly
happened?”
4. Eliciting a narration to clarify an argument already made before: “Canyou recall
a situation when your father behaved in an authoritative way (when you
stopped believing in justice, peace, etc.)?”
5. Addressing a nonself-experienced event/phase or transmitted knowledge:
“Can you remember a situation when somebody talked about this event (how
your father died)?”
In the interview’s second phase, we first limit ourselves to internal narrative
questions, meaning questions regarding that which has already been
discussed. It is first in the interview’s third phase that we orient ourselves
according to our own scientific criteria and pose external narrative questions
regarding topics that interest us and have not yet been mentioned. The questions
we formulate in this second phase of the interview are based on the
protocol-like notes taken during the main narrative; that means they do not
introduce a topic the narrator has not already mentioned. We understand the
topics or biographical experiences introduced by the interviewee as an invitation
to pose deeper questions and in so doing, do not censor whether it would
perhaps be too embarrassing or too difficult to again thematize this or that
area. If difficult areas of life are involved, then we mainly pose our questions
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in the subjunctive: “Perhaps you could go into a bit more of detail regarding
. . . ?” or “Could I possibly ask you about the time when you . . . ?” If our
interlocutors are not in an acute crisis situation, then we try to help them in
remembering experiences they have difficulty talking about or that they can
only in part fragmentarily remember. First, we make certain that they would
like help in remembering and constructing a narration. So, for example, we
ask: “Would you like me to help you in remembering that?” If the interviewee
responds in the affirmative, then in conversations with people presently in
stable life situations, we in part also use the “scenic-memory” technique, as I
call it, and try together with the interviewee to go into the past situation and
put the individual fragments together (see the following). Another type of
questioning—also in a narrative style—targets fantasies and dreams that we
reconstruct in the same way as in the scenic-memory technique. If, for example,
the daughter of a Shoah survivor says that she does not know anything
about the time her mother spent in a concentration camp, then we ask: “Can
yourecall asituation whenyoufantasized aboutyourmotheratthis time?”
The ensuing questions regarding mentioned fantasies will then, as in the
scenic-memory technique, pertain to specific details.
In addition to these narrative-generating questions and questions regarding
scenic memory, when it comes to difficult moments in the talk, where very
painful and still very burdensome experiences are discussed, where intense
feelings are revived, where the interviewees cry, are deeply hurt or angry,
then we also use the “active-listening” technique from client-centered therapy
(Gordon, 1974; Rogers, 1951). With the “emphatic understanding
response process,” we listeners try to decipher what the interviewee has said
and signalize our interest in understanding and our willingness to be open to
the other’s feelings. So, we either enter into the interviewee’s current feelings
with remarks such as “That still moves you quite a bit today,” or we go into
the feelings the interviewee experienced during the past situation with comments
such as “At that time, you felt helpless.”
In addition to the biographer’s coming to an understanding of himself or
herself, which I will explain later, the main biographical narration offers
important opportunities for helping the listener understand the interviewee
as well as for the rest of the directed conversation. By carefully listening during
the main biographical narration, we get a feeling for the strategies the narrators
use to make reparations for threatening or problematical experiences
as well as the topics they avoid.8
If the interviewee, for example, avoids talking
about his parents’ murder, by perhaps not mentioning their death in any
way during the main narration, then we also will not go into this with the socalled
internal narrative questions. Thus, in this phase, we do not work
against the interviewee’s defenses. Nonetheless, the interviewee himself or
herself frequently raises the topics avoided in the main narration during the
first questioning session. On the one hand, the constraints of storytelling
(Hermanns, 1987; Schütze, 1976) cause this and on the other hand, the feeling
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of trust that increases over time. The interviewees become more and more
secure; they notice that we are seriously interested in what they have been
through and that we are not judging what they say. If in the interview’s third
part we ask them about the things they avoided talking about, for example,
their parents’ fate,in this case, we also do indeed accept it if theywish to avoid
the subject. We thus do not repeatedly pressure them to talk about topics they
avoided. In addition to this view into the biographers’ repair strategies, during
the main narration we listeners also gain insight into the respective biography’s
difficult areas as well as into its secure areas or places.9
In the meantime,
we know in which phases or areas of life the biographer felt or feels
relatively secure and safe and in which he or she does not. This information is
crucial for the questioning part where we orient ourselves according to the
following rules: We support the narrative process from difficult up through
traumatizing experiences when these come up in the discussion. We help the
interviewee construct stories and see to it that they can temporally narrate
themselves out of these situations. We also round off the conversation by having
the interviewee comprehensively tell us about secure phases and areas in
life.
To put this into more detail: If it is difficult for the narrator to talk about his
or her sufferings but the physical sensations and feelings still come up, that is,
they are again present and because of this so burdensome that the biographers
can only brokenly tell about them, then jointly with the biographer, we
try to piece the remembered fragments together into a story or we help him or
her in reconstructing experiences and constructing a story. As listeners, we
can help the narrators put themselves back into the past situation and help
them remember individual parts, which we then jointly try to piece together
into a story. With the scenic-memory technique, we can start with sensory and
physical memory fragments, and by asking questions about specific details,
we can gradually develop the various scenes by first calling the external
setting—the place, the climate, the sounds, the smells, the people present—
back into memory. It helps to gradually develop the scene’s spatial setting
and to go from there to gradually reproduce the series of events. However, if
things stay with individual fragments, it is very important that we help our
interlocutors in recognizing the reality in the fragments and to also let them
know that their gaps in memory are legitimate and that they also serve to protect
them. To nonetheless give them the feeling that they can remember, additional
questions are needed, above all, regarding situations from the traumatizing
life phase that the interviewees can remember well. After we have
thematized these difficult situations in life, very decisive is that we help them
narrate their way out of these burdensome situations and life phases. This
means we would not end a talk while a difficult phase was being thematized.
If, for example, I speak with a Shoah survivor, I cannot end the talk before he
or she has temporally narrated himself or herself past the time of the persecution.
If during the first contact it becomes clear that this, in accordance with
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the rule of narrative interviewing to not interrupt during the main narration,
is not possible, then in this case, I act counter to the rule. That is why competent
time management during the interview is of great importance for us. Let
us assume that we had agreed in advance with the interviewee to a conversation
that would last about 4 hours and the interviewee still found himself or
herself in the persecution phase after 3 hours of main narration. I would then
intervene and ask him or her to tell more about this phase in a second conversation
and to now, in the last hour of our present talk, concentrate on the time
when he or she was set free and the ensuing life phase where his or her life
again stabilized. That means that after having discussed a difficult phase, we
by all means try to switch the subject to one that will again make the narrator
feel secure. If the narrator has narrated past the difficult phase or area in his or
her life, then with our questions we seek out these secure areas and let him or
her tell us about them. Above all, after hearing an entire main narration, we as
a rule have numerous indications as to the phases or areas the narrators feel
secure and stable in.
Such an interview requires—if possible, in two encounters—a conversation
with a duration of 4 to 8 hours. For the most part, we first go into burdensome
experiences more directly and using the scenic-memory technique in
the second interview when a relationship of trust has already been established.
Many of the Shoah survivors also asked for a number of shorter
appointments, for whom then the complete main biographical narration was
not possible in one sitting; instead, we limited ourselves to narrations about
individual phases and to questions regarding these. One can assume that
with these shorter appointments these interlocutors wanted to protect themselves
from getting too involved in a memory process that confronts them
with an alarming past. In guiding conversations with extremely traumatized
people, we the interviewers had to decide whether this method could take
place in its usual form, with a main biographical narration taking place in one
sitting.
What this means for shorter counseling talks is that it is advantageous if
first some appointments are possible where the clients can tell about particular
phases in their life or also about particular topics and where the counselors
do not so much have to directly ask the client to discuss difficult or even traumatic
experiences. However, this does not mean that we do not help the client
tell about difficult experiences but that in the first encounters, we do not yet
ask for detailed narrations regarding traumatizing experiences; we instead
justtryto keepthenarrativeprocess going—thatmeanssupportingthenarrative
process with paralinguistic support and questions such as “What happened
next?” A difficult balance thus has to be maintained between going
into the client’s sufferings, not making a trauma exposition too hastily, and
keeping the memory processes from overflowing. In doing so, one should
also not underestimate the fact that in a 1-hour conversation the kind of trust
that comes into being is probably not comparable with the kind that comes
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into being during an interview lasting several hours. On the other hand, the
advantage of a number of shorter counseling talks is that through a longer
process, the clients can, after having given a biographical narration, think
about this narration and also experience its effects outside of the counseling
situation. At the next meeting, the counselors can also gain insight into the
effect the conversations had. This is one of the reasons why I, in contrast to
other colleagues who conduct narrative interviews, generally offer the biographers
a second conversation. The amount of holding back that takes place
when narratives about traumatizing life situations are evoked and the care
involved in building up a relationship of trust are also important during first
talks, where the clients offer collective, traumatic experiences as counseling
topics because we cannot knowwhether other—individual—traumatic experiences
are hidden behind these experiences, which can also pop up in the client’s
memory while discussing the experiences of collective violence.
THE MAIN NARRATION’S
CURATIVE CHANCES FOR COMING
TO AN UNDERSTANDING OF ONESELF
Now, what could the curative chances of a biographical main narration be
for people who find themselves in a stable life situation? Because the interlocutors
are first encouraged to tell a longer narration about self-lived experiences,
they can structure the narration according to the criteria they themselves
find relevant; the memory process is supported and not all that
infrequently processes of self-understanding already take place here. Via cognition,
feelings, or subjects, we listeners also do not experience the narrators
at a remove from what they are telling about; it is rather the case that they are
embedded in their narrations about biographical experiences. In contrast to
argumentations and descriptions, self-lived experiences also have the advantage
of being closer to what concretely happened and was experienced in the
past in the narrated situations. Apart from restaging past situations, telling a
story is the only way to come close to an integral reproduction of what at that
time happened or the past experience’s gestalt. However, it is rather the case
that argumentations are formulated from the present perspective and from
the standpoint of their social desirability. Although in telling about experiences
it is the case that we interact more with our memories than with the listeners,
our explanations regarding what we experienced are directed at the
interlocutors. If we are able to support the biographers in their narrations
without posing any additional questions and if many memories easily surface
in their memory that they can tell about, then what can clearly be seen is
how the narrations become more and more detailed, the orientation with
respect to the listeners lessens, and the physical memories become stronger.
Although at the beginning the biographers perhaps reflect on how they are
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going to present their life story, on which areas in their life they should talk
about, as the narration starts to flow, this effort subsides. The narrators
increasingly find themselves in a stream of memories; impressions, images,
sensual and physical feelings and components of the remembered situation
come up, some of which do not fit in their present situation and that they have
not thought about for a long time. The narration’s proximity to the past thus
increases in the course of the narration, and perspectives entirely different
from the present perspective show themselves, which become clear in the
argumentation parts or also in the narrated anecdotes. Through this process,
the biographers can already gain specific insights into their lives during the
main narration, and this can lead to their modifying or reorganizing their
view oftheirlife.10
So abiographernarratinghis orherlife storycanperceive a
tendency in his or her presentation, and he or she can, for example, ask himself
or herself: “Why do I only speak about those situations in which I was
helpless? Does this mean that I only see myself as the helpless object of outer
relations?” An additional insight that always recurs in the main narration:
“Why do I only tell of the disagreeable experiences with my mother or my
father;there were othersituations as well?” Thenarratorscanthentryto resist
this view and look for other experiences in their memory. They can also begin
to view the experiences narrated to date against another background. This
process can lead to the reorganization of the to date, mainly latent overall biographical
perspective, and the life story experienced can now, for example,
present itself more in the gestalt of an active and autonomous life or a childhood
with disagreeable but also agreeable experiences.
The dynamic of the narrative stream and the interaction with the interlocutors
also contain chances for reorganization. Memories avoided up to
nowcanunintentionallycome upandlead to theverbalization of material not
previously taken into consideration. Just a frown or a questioning “mhm” on
the listener’s part can trigger detailed information regarding that which has
not yet been thematized. The decisive effect for reorganization lies in thematizing
pieces of the experienced life story that have up to this point been
pushed to the edge of consciousness—and this thematization appears almost
inevitably whenthe biographergives himself or herself over to a memoryand
narration stream. If it comes to telling about experiences that had to date been
held back with substantial psychological energy, additional thematically
related memories surface from memory (Schütze, 1984). Presencing experiences
that were to date held back can for the biographermaketheir biographical
relevance clear for his or her journey through life and cause him or her to
make reinterpretations that lead to a change in his or her entire biographical
view. Fritz Schütze (1984) perceived the therapeutic effect of biographical
narration precisely in the fact that by reflecting on the “interrelations and passages
of traumatic experiences that have been made narratively explicit,”
they can be won back for a “consistent concept of identity” (p. 108). The traumatic
areas of life that have to date been bracketed out of biographical selfRosenthal
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perception can through the telling and by biographically working through
them—in the sense of reflecting on their meaning for one’s own life story—
again be integrated into the life story. The autonomous form of the entire life
story, which first takes place without any direct linguistic intervention on the
listeners’ part, also contains the chance for integrating the threatening material.
Narrating the entire life story also helps the biographer win a feeling of
continuity. Breaks in the life story cannot be patched up by not thematizing
them; this only leads to the continued feeling of lost continuity. The life story
can in contrast, contribute to the necessary putting together of individual
fragments of memory and to integrating the traumatic experience in the overall
view of the life story: “For establishing the sense of continuity, the connection
between past and present is of central significance in psychological
recovery, whether this occurs spontaneously or with the help of psychoanalysis
or psychotherapy” (Ornstein, 1985, p. 107). For Shoah survivors, the psychoanalyst,
Anna Ornstein (1985), also saw the decisive curative chance in
integrating traumatic life phases into the life story. Not to be underestimated
here is that this requires a longer therapeutic process. Nonetheless, a comprehensive
biographical narrationcanalreadyhavefirst effects inthis direction.
ON THE CURATIVE EFFECTS OF
DIRECTLY ASKING THE CLIENT TO NARRATE
Being asked to narrate particular difficult or even traumatic experiences
and life phases gives the biographers the feeling that we listeners recognize
them in their suffering. The rest lightens them up, how contrary to their fears,
what cannot be openly talked about can be put into language and thereby
becomes communicable and above all, at the same time, real. So, for example,
many of the Shoah survivors I have interviewed recurringly ask: “Did I really
experience that, is it perhaps really a dream?” or “Am I just imagining it all?”
From this perspective, the time when they were persecuted belongs in
another world. If the survivors were first convinced that there was no way to
translate between the world of destruction and their world today, narrating
opened a bridge between both worlds for them. The narration was a way to
transform the foreign into the familiar, where through the act of narrating, the
unknown is made known and understandable to both the narrator himself or
herself and the listener (Matthes, 1985; Schütze, 1976). If people cannot tell
their traumatic experiences, then they cannot share what they have experienced
with others, and they experience themselves at a distance as well as a
relationship of being excluded in relation to those who themselves did not
experience something similar. Foreign experiences are still most likely to be
comprehensible when they are narrated in detail, and barely when only short
mentionings and reports are presented. The established impression among
many Shoah survivors that they cannot tell their traumatic experiences and
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that they will not be understood by others who have not experienced something
similar was an additional and heavy psychological burden. The feeling
of alienation and not belonging as a result of traumatic experiences (Herman,
1992) is further maintained or strengthened by this inability to speak.
Manyof myinterlocutors were thenalso very surprised that theywere—at
least in part—able to tell about the persecution they experienced. As one of
myinterlocutors putit aftertheinterview:“I hadneverthoughtthatnarrating
could be that easy.” But many also asked me at the next encounter: “What did
you do to me to make me tell so much? You hardly asked any questions at all!”
They had suffered from their previous inability to speak and did not think
that they could overcome this. In telling their life story, already during the
main narration, they frequently found out that they could almost narrate
without any help and that they only needed an attentive and during the narration,
encouraging listener. What additional interview appointments with
me showed is how the first conversation brought an explosive number of
other memories to consciousness and how the biographers now really
noticed their previously suppressed need to talk about what happened.
Throughthe experience in the interview, some of the survivors then found the
courage to also speak with others about their persecuted past and began to
break the silence in their families. Directly after our conversations, several of
them spoke with their children or also grandchildren; for others, this on the
other hand, took several years during which they recurringly made first careful
attempts. In some families I could watch or accompany this process of
opening the family dialogue over many years. In 1989-1990 in Israel, I conducted
the first interviews with survivors and stayed in touch with many of
them for years by mail. I visited many of them when I was in the country. This
showed how gradually the opening process took place in the families. So, a
number of the interlocutors first asked me after a number of years for a copy
of the recorded interviews to give to their children or to have translated for
them. In other families, the children contacted me after their parents’ death
and asked me to speak with them. In most of my interlocutors’ families, colleagues
and I in the context of a new project between 1992 and 1996 questioned
the second and third generation in individual interviews and also
carried out family interviews (Rosenthal, 1998). Here, we again saw the
strong effect biographical-narrative interviews can have on individuals and
the family dialogue.
To get back to the effect of a comprehensive biographical narration: Experiencing
such a narrationcan,as has already been emphasized, lead to becoming
conscious of a need to share one’s feelings and of one’s suffering from the
inability to speak. The conversations’ questioning part is also very important.
If we would not also directly pose questions regarding very burdensome
experiences that were only hinted at, then the danger would exist of increasing
the feeling of exclusion and being different that is based on experiences.
Traumatized people’s inability to speak cannot only be seen as the primary
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consequence of traumatization; it comes much more from the others’ need to
forget and to not have to deal with the pain involved in encountering survivors
of violence. Leo Eitinger (1980:159), who as a psychologist worked with
Shoah survivors, described the conflict of interest between the traumatized
people and the others as follows:
As is the case with every unpleasant experience, war and victims are something
the community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion is drawn over everything painful
and unpleasant. . . . We find the two sides face-to-face; on one side the victims
who perhaps wish to forget but cannot, and on the other all those with strong,
often unconscious motives who very intensely both wish to forget and succeed
in doing so. This contrast is experienced daily and is frequently very painful for
both sides. (p. 18)
Thereby, it is very important that we the interviewers or counselor do not
further increase traumatized people’s experience of others who do not want
to hear what they have to say about the violence they have been through. For
this, we need to be particularly alert for indications and ready to want to
understand narrations about violent experiences. This also requires maintaining
a balance between careful and narration-generating questioning
regarding very burdensome memories. Our carefulness should not surpass
our interlocutors’ fears and defenses. Interlocutors also sometimes make references
to violent experiences so as to test whether we the listeners are ready
to discuss them. However, the references also show the narrators’ ambivalence
between the wish to speak and the wish to keep silent. On the one hand,
touching on certain experiences that they have perhaps not yet spoken about
with anyone triggers the need to share, but on the other hand, they are afraid
of the process of putting these experiences into language, and they fear a lack
of understanding on the listeners’ part.
Very careful listening is necessary to go into these references in the questioning
part and to support the biographer as he or she tells about the experiences
lying behind them. If these are only fragmentarily and inconsistently
present, the biographers are clearly relieved when we help them construct
stories. If experiences cannot be narrated, then there is the danger that the victims
will remain caught in what they experienced and unable to distance
themselves fromit. Then,experiencingthe past as separate fromthe present is
also hardly possible: “The act of reproduction places a past at a reified distance
from the narration’s present and accomplishes a temporal break”
(Röttgers, 1988, p. 10). In addition to the curative effect of an in part almost
physical distancing from what was experienced through constructing a story
that can now be viewed as an object by the narrator and the listener, the narrated
acquires reality and also credibility. In telling about burdensome and
traumatic experiences, evident for both the narrator and the listener is how
the act of telling and the accompanying movement out of the inability to
speak puts the narrator’s ever-current feelings and physical sensations at a
distance from what was experienced. As liberating as it is to revive feelings
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and to cry, what is decisive is to distance oneself from the past through the
narration and as the narration continues, to narrate oneself out of the linearity
of the experiences from the time of the persecution. The narrator can thereby
perceive how the present distinguishes itself from the past without, however,
losing thepast as apiece ofhis ownlife. Throughthenarration,thepast is won
back more as a real and accessible part of the life story. The past should not be
closed—in the sense of locked away—but should instead be able to be understood
as a past life that distinguishes itself from one’s present life but nonetheless
extends into the present. Accordingly, what is important is not necessarily
wanting to eradicate the traces of the past in the present but instead
learning to accept them so that the victim can integrate them into his or her
daily life. We the interviewers or counselors can, precisely by avoiding a
psychopathological diagnosis, help the biographers see these traces as normal
consequences of an abnormal past, as biographical work in relation to the
traumatizing experiences. By asking biographers to recount experiences
linked with the effects of traumatization, one can succeed in erecting a to date
unperceived connection between the “symptom” and the experienced. The
traces of the past can thereby be accepted as justified and fair to reality. So, for
example, a survivor told me that she has a thing for shoes, that she would constantly
buy herself shoes and that she already hoarded tons of them in her
apartment. She thinks that this is a sign that she is crazy. I ask her in accordance
with thenarrativerequest to tell: “Canyourecall asituation atthecamp
that in some way involved shoes?” The survivor recounted how one day at
camp she lost one of her clogs and knew that if she would be unable to “organize”
a new one on the same day, then that would be it for her. She had managed
to find anothershoe, and this had saved her life. Up to this point,she had
never consciously thought that her thing for shoes was connected to a biographically
relevant experience. Through this example, it becomes clear how
it is possible for foreign biographical understanding—or we could also speak
of a biographical diagnosis—to correspond with biographical selfunderstanding.
The advantage of guiding a biographical-narrative conversation
is precisely that through the narrative process, self-understanding
becomes possible, which takes place, as much as possible, without the interviewers’
or counselors’ interpretations.
CONVERSATIONS DURING ACUTE LIFE CRISES
In the following, I would briefly like to discuss the extent to which conversations
with people in acute life crises who have fled their native countries
and who were in parttorture victims require a muchmore careful questioning
procedure than the one up to now discussed. Asignificant difference from the
procedure discussed up to now is that these people are less able to go into a
comprehensive biographical narration and during the conversation particuRosenthal
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larly focus on the burdensome phase in their native country and the current
situation in Germany. The current crisis determines their thinking and feeling
to such a degree that looking back into the past before the traumatizing
events, a past that was irretrievably destroyed, is in the present much too
painful. Considerations as to whether at some point it will be possible to
again take up pieces of the lost past are in this situation still much too threatening.
But on the other hand, people who find themselves in a phase of
retraumatization or a further phase of sequential traumatization (Keilson,
1979/1992), who live in an uprooted situation and with a threatening present
and future, these people need to talk about what they suffered and are still
suffering. That is why not discussing the traumatic experiences before the
escape and the deportation fears linked with this are exactly what belong to
the retraumatizing conditions in the host country. “Traumatized people are
decisively at the mercy of their surroundings. . . . There is a deep and, for the
most part, unspoken need for the traumatization to at all be seen, to be recognized”
(Müller-Hohagen, 1997, p. 17). The refugees and asylum seekers who
up to now declared their readiness to be interviewed by me or one of my colleagues
would like to speak about their painful experiences and be accepted
and recognized in and with their suffering and fears.
From this type of life crisis, where both looking back into the past before
the threat as well as looking ahead into the future is threatening but where
there is a simultaneous need to speak about the crisis, significant challenges
for guiding a biographical-narrative conversation come into being. Because
for the most part we do not have a main biographical narration, we lack the
thoroughly helpful possibility of being able to refer to secure places in the life
and family story and in the interviewee’s current daily life. The focus on the
incurred suffering is due to the current life crisis, and it would thereby be very
problematic to insist that the entire life story be narrated. We have to be prepared
for the fact that difficult and traumatizing experiences rather than stabilizing
memories are what will be increasingly remembered.
So, in guiding conversations, we have to maintain a balance between supporting
the narrator as he or she tells about incurred sufferings and at the
same time, seeing to it that the interviewee does not lose himself or herself
too strongly in traumatic memories. That is why what can firstly be recommended
is to concentrate on providing paralinguistic support for the thematizations
of violent situations the interviewee himself or herself suffered and
introduced to the conversation and that continue to cause threatening memories
and images and to carefully and sparsely ask the interviewee to narrate
aboutviolent experiences andto avoid detailed questions abouttraumatizing
experiences. Alot of space should be given for discussing the fears regarding
the current life situation—in particular, using the active-listening method. In
addition, particularly high attentiveness must accompany the search for stabilizing
moments in the current life situation. It belongs to the retraumatizing
situation11
of the unclarified right of residence, the current deportation dan-
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ger, that the present is not only extremely burdened by the past but also
threatened by an unclarified and unforeseeable future. What this life situation
of people with an unclarified right of residence precisely demands is that
we the interviewers also look for possibilities that provide support for the
present situation outside of the interviews and that we give up the reserve we
otherwise have for practical or social work. Refugees and survivors of torture
also need the biased position of social scientists, as David Becker (2000),
among others, demanded of psychotherapists. Regarding “non-neutrality
towards the victims,” Becker emphasized how the biased therapist should
recognize the political realities and “the importance of relating to our patients
from an active position, breaking the silence and calling the atrocities the
regime was committing by the name they deserved.” Waltraud Wirtgen
(1997), who works as a doctor and psychotherapist for Refugio—one of the
advice centers for refugees and torture victims in Munich—further concluded
from this:
In this sense, it is therefore necessary to interfere and to try to intervene there
where structures in the context of the asylum laws do not provide traumatized
refugees andsurvivors of torture with adequatehelp and protection, but instead
cause further traumatizations. (p. 85)
Because of this, the interviewer also needs to know about the possible
traumatizing life conditions in the host country as well as in the native country.
In conversations with torture survivors, what above all is to be avoided is
through our questions reminding them of burdening, present situations
regarding the authorities or even torture situations experienced in the past.
Because of this, interviewers and counselors also have to delicately and
reservedly pose detailed questions regarding the violent situations the interviewees
experienced so that these questions do not allow any references to
interrogation situations to come up. We should also be aware of the fact that
the depictions traumatized people make—both in the context of individual as
well as collective experiences of violence—largely result from the expectations
of their surroundings and with asylum seekers in Germany, are not seldom
the social product of the criteria for the right to asylum and the hearings
linked to it. That is why we the interviewers and counselors need to know
these hearings’ conditions and above all, reflect on the extent to which our
own conversation-guiding interests can correspond with these. In connection
with conversations with survivors of sexual violence, this is explicitly
demanded by, for example, Mary R. Harvey and colleagues (Harvey,
Mischler, Koenen, & Harney, 2000):
Although making meaning of their histories of trauma is a task each sexual
abuse survivor must struggle with by and for herself, the process is inherently
and intractably social. That is, their stories are told and retold to others, and the
form and content of their stories reflect their life situations. For this reason, we
have been urging researchers and clinicians—and the same cautions apply to
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friends, family members, and others—to be reflective about their own preferred
stories. (p. 308)
Dueto thedangerofmakingareference tointerrogationandhearingsituations
and above all, due to an acute life crisis situation, it is recommended that
in such conversations one avoid the scenic-memory technique and instead
work more with narrative questioning, which simply keeps the interviewee
narrating and that supported by the active-listening technique, makes it possible
for the interviewee to put his or her feelings into language. Over and
above that, with respect to research and counseling, further reflections on the
chances and limits of narrative questioning are needed, so as not to unthinkingly
subject people to further burdensome situations.
I would also like to emphasize that for many social researchers this does
not go without saying: To guide a biographical-narrative conversation, which
is also always an intervention, sound training is necessary. Last but not least,
this requirement is demanded by our ethical responsibility vis-à-vis our
interviewees.
NOTES
1. In biographical research, we distinguish between life history and life story. By life
story, we mean someone’s narrated, personal life story as related to another in conversation
or as written down in present time. Life history refers to the experiences a person
has lived through.
2. My research is embedded in the biographical research approach that was beginning
to reestablish itself in the 1970s, in German sociology in particular (see Apitzsch &
Inowlocki, 2000; Kohli, 1986; Rosenthal, in press) but also at the international level (see
Bertaux, 1981; Bertaux & Kohli, 1984; Chamberlayne, Bornat, & Wengraf, 2002; Denzin,
1989). Psychology has also begun rediscovering the biographical approach. Internationally,
the work by Jerome Bruner (1990), George C. Rosenwald and Richard L.
Ochberg (1992), and Dan McAdams (1993)—to name but a few—has led to a rediscovery
of verstehende psychology andabove all, biographical researchoperating with narrative
methods. Recently the concept of narrative identity has gained more attention,
and fairly elaborated versions of the concept have been proposed (Holstein &
Gubrium, 2000).
3.DanBar-On (1995)discussedsimilar experiences andalso the enormous positive
effect on the working through process by telling each other the life story in dialogue
groups with descendants of Holocaust survivors and descendants of Nazi perpetrators
and in his recent work with groups including participants from Palestine, Israel, South
Africa, and Northern Ireland (see Bar-On, 2000).
4.To date,themajorityof myinterviewees hadnever intheir life been placedunder
psychiatric treatment.
5. The narrative-questioning technique is now, in particular, also increasingly
being used for counseling and therapy purposes (Loch & Schulze, in press).
6. Some interviews were conducted by two interviewers.
930 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / December 2003
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7. A more structured form is: “We are interested in the life stories of children of
Holocaust survivors (or people with a chronic disease). Please tell me your life story.
Anything. . . .”
8. One can also speak of defense mechanisms. But in biographical research we
avoid a division into conscious coping and unconscious defense mechanisms and generally
speak of biographical repair strategies. These strategies, which are employed to
reduce burdens, are a part of the “biographical work” or “biographical structuring”
necessary to interpret a particular life history and to thereby give it meaning (FischerRosenthal,
2000). See also the discussion about biographical work by Gubrium,
Holstein, and Buckholdt (1994).
9. This procedure has a certain similarity to the techniques used by Luise
Reddemann and Ulrich Sachsse (1996) for establishing a secure internal place:
The majority of the patients report that as children they went to concrete places,
to places which appeared secure to them (e.g., in the forest or a specific meadow)
or thatthey internally went to a place where they felt secure. This ability is reactivated
in therapy. (p. 172)
Sachsse (1999) also tried to call memories to life that bring good and secure experiences
with them. However, in this comparison, one has to emphasize that Reddemann and
Sachsse used many sessions to establish this secure place.
10. These considerations are based on a gestalt-theoretical-phenomenological concept
of the dialectical interrelation between experience—memory—narration
(Rosenthal, 1995).
11. On the retraumatizing conditions of the life situations of asylum seekers in Germany,
see Weber (1998).
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Gabriele Rosenthal (born 1954) studied sociology and psychology at the University
of Konstanz (Germany) and received her Ph.D. in sociology from the
University of Bielefeld in 1986. In 1993 she completed her habilitation thesis
on “Experienced and Narrated Life” at the University of Kassel. She is professor
for qualitative methods at the University of Göttingen. She is president of
the Research Committee: Biography and Society in the International Association
of Sociology and also president of the section Biographical Research of the
German Sociological Association. Her teaching and research interests address
interpretive sociology, qualitative methods, and biographical research.
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