Interests
I spend a significant portion of my professional time
in teaching and supervision of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the
University of Alabama Department of Psychiatry and the
New Orleans-Birmingham Psychoanalytic Center.
In
addition for graduate psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and
psychoanalysts, I direct continuing education programs through the
Psychoanalytic Center and provide case supervision for clinicians in
practice on an individual basis.
I am active in professional writing in
psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and medicine.
A list of my publications may be found under the Resume section
of this website.
I am
particularly interested in learning from creative writers ways of
conveying the analytic experience in words that are more “real” and
convincing than the style of traditional scientific writing.
In addition, in some of my writings I explore the similarities
between the creative process in writing and other arts and the process
of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis—what is “written” and “read” in the
therapeutic situation.
I
also describe ways that clinicians may learn about dimensions of their
own work by reading imaginative literature and by trying their hands at
creative writing themselves..
I serve on the
panel of
writing consultants for the
New Directions Program in Psychoanalytic
Critical Thinking and Writing (Washington Psychoanalytic Center).
I am available for professional writing consultation.
Other Interdisciplinerary Interests
I am interested in explorations between psychoanalysis
and other disciplines, such as creative writing,
literature, art, and
medicine.
(See
Resume section for
presentations and publications.
Also, see Narrative Medicine below.)
Narrative medicine is an emergent discipline that
focuses on the subjective experience of the patient, of the doctor, and
of the physician-with-the-patient.
The term “narrative” refers to a way of listening to patients in
which physicians may come to hear the fuller “story” of the human being
who is experiencing an illness.
In this field physicians read stories, or narratives, written by
published physician-authors about clinical experience and they write
their own narratives about their experience with patients.
In so doing, physicians not only come to know more
comprehensively about their patients’ lives, but they also learn more
about their own emotional reactions to their patients and thereby are
able to be more responsive to them - to the benefit
of patient and physician alike.
The
practice of narrative medicine
improves the
physician’s
capacity
for listening, for self-awareness, and for
self-reflection. Through narrative medicine doctors may be able to
emotionally process—to “digest” and “metabolize”—the secondary trauma of
working with patients who come for care in all conditions of distress,
day in and day out, for years. This lessens physician burn-out and
improves physician satisfaction. Most importantly, it allows the
physician to
be more
emotionally present with
patients and enables him or her to better accompany
them
through their
illnesses.
Like psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, narrative
medicine is centrally involved with the doctor-patient relationship.
And narrative medicine shares much in common with the
process of psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis, in which patients and analysts/therapists are able to
recognize and name feelings and put emotional experience into a context
of more comprehensive understandings.
The following is an excerpt from a commentary by me in
the Spring 2006 issue of the
Permanente Journal.
Restoring Our Humanity: Our Intention to Heal
Being a doctor can be such a lonely place to inhabit.
Our task-oriented approaches to patient care can all too often reduce us
to feeling more like two-dimensional characters in someone else's story
than three- and four-dimensional people in our own meaningful lives.
Never has there been a time in the history of medicine when physicians
have had a greater need to find meaning in what they do. When we
translate clinical experience into written narratives, we bring to life
the physician-patient relationships in which we live. The act of writing
helps us to restore our own humanity, and the act of seeing ourselves
with our patients on the written page reminds us of what led most of us
into medicine in the first place. These stories both humanize the
physician-patient encounter and make physicians feel more like the human
beings they are than the "human-doings" they sometimes become. And it is
only through being more fully human ourselves that we may convey
convincingly to patients our intention to heal.
I offer a weeklong Scholars Week course in the spring
for third- and fourth-year medical students, titled: “Doctors’ Stories:
Introduction to Narrative Medicine.”
Please see the following link to
an article about the course in the 2006 Winter issue
UAB Medicine, “Student
Rounds: Medicine and the Arts” (pp 22-23):
Click here to
Download
in PDF
Narrative Medicine Discussion Group
I also
co-lead (with Waid Shelton, MD, a pulmonologist) a monthly Narrative
Medicine Discussion Group for UASOM faculty.
In it physicians read and discuss the works
of published physician-writers and write and reflect upon their own
patient narratives.
Publications
Featuring Dr. Griffin’s Work in Narrative Medicine:
“Narrative
Medicine: Emphasizing the Humanness of the Physician-Patient
Relationship.” ,
UAB
SYNOPSIS, Vol. 24, No. 23, June 20, 2005.
“Student Rounds: Medicine and
the Arts,” UAB Medicine, Vol.
31, No. 3, Winter 2006, pp 22-23:
Click here to
Download PDF format
“Life Stories: Another Kind of Page Calls Future Doctors.”
UAB Magazine, Summer
2007.
“Journal Club: Narrative Medicine Writes a New
Chapter in the Physician-Patient Relationship.”
References to
other publications and presentations in the area of narrative medicine
may be found in the
Resume section of this website.